Abstract
This study was conducted to see the perception of the Malaysian on the theory of evolution with special focus on the origin of man from ape. 640 respondents, males and females from all over the country of Malaysia were obtained randomly. The respondents come from various ethnic and religious backgrounds from the age of 20 to 50. The study used the questionnaire method whereby the respondents were given a booklet containing statements on the relation between science and religion including a statement related to the theory of evolution that man originally came from ape. The statements were provided with five responses to be chosen by the respondents. The booklets of questionnaire were collected to be analysed by using the SPSS to obtain the mean response, the mean response according to the ethnic, religious and academic background. T-test were also conducted if the means responses were significantly different. The findings show that the 77% of the Muslim respondents rejected the theory of evolution that men come from apes, 22% of the Christian, 23% of the Buddhists and 36% of the Hindu respondents rejected this theory also. The mean difference between the response of the Muslim respondents significantly different from the mean responses all the other religious groups. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n1s1p338
Highlights
The pertinent issue which lingers in the mind of the people with regard to the origin of human being probably is the issues where does man came from
A report by the Malaysian Science and Technological Information (MASTIC, 2008), only 17.5% of the Malaysian considered the Theory of Evolution to be true, 31.7% was unsure and 50.8% considered it to be untrue, while in other Muslim countries, the percentage are close to each other for example in Egypt only 8%, in Pakistan 14%, in Indonesia 16% and the highest percentage is in Turkey with 22% of the Turk believed that the Theory of Evolution is true
This means that the respondents generally rejected the theory that human being originated from ape, but the rejection is not strong enough
Summary
The pertinent issue which lingers in the mind of the people with regard to the origin of human being probably is the issues where does man came from. Ibn Kathir (1999), the 10th century Muslim scholar on the Qur’an had explained that the verse talks about the process of evolution of the living organism. In his book The Reconstruction of Religious Thought, in which he claimed that since the World Self in the universe has a single purpose i.e. the perfection of man, it must be a single and continuous process from the beginning to its end. This is not possible unless every state of the Universe emerges and evolves out of its previous condition. This means that the universe as a whole and the various objects which make up the universe did not come into existence suddenly at a particular moment in the past but have acquired their present shape by the process of gradual development
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