The sixth annual religious peace conference organised by the Interfaith Roundtable will be held in Dublin on Saturday 5 June.
The conference, titled Deity and Darwin: Science and Religion in the Age of the Unreasonable, will seek to find out if there is “a common ground that articulates the relationship between science and religion” or whether they are “mutually incompatible concepts, safe when apart but incendiary when mixed”.
In a statement, co-ordinator of the Interfaith Roundtable, Sheikh Shaheed Satardien told Metro Éireann: “The human genome project is still underway. Astronomers are finding new planets on a monthly basis. And yet billions of people, from all walks of life, from all cultures and backgrounds, still maintain a firm conviction that there is more to life than DNA or planets from other solar systems.”
He continued: “Can this be resolved or reconciled, or is it unreasonable to suppose that this dialectic is merely another aspect of natural selection?”
International acclaimed speakers scheduled to participate at the conference include Prof Al-Rifaie, a scientist based in Saudi Arabia and chair of the Vatican-Islam Dialogue initiative, as well as representatives from religious, political, business and civic society groups in Ireland.
Sheikh Satardien said all the papers would look at “the divine delusion or the secular swindle” and associated issues.
“The level of discourse that surrounds religion in contemporary times is articulated on the basis of the behaviour of tiny minorities [being] used to define the majority or indeed the essence of that faith,” he said.
Sheikh Satardien said he believed that those who wish to see the end of religion appear to be in dominance, especially when it comes to media exposure, while “those who articulate other points of view are invariably portrayed as cranks or ‘apologists’”.
“Given that there are no shortages of actual cranks, it is quite easy to support those portrayals,” he said.
The Dublin-based Muslim cleric explained that his Interfaith Roundtable is seeking to refute the view that those who have a spiritual conviction are intellectually challenged in some way.
“The rationale of the person with ‘reason deficit’ by virtue of his/her religious affiliation is most visibly promoted by Richard Dawkins, but he is far from the only protagonist, and in media circles at least the Dawkins agenda has been very successful,” he said.
