Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall

Aug 4th, 2007 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Best of luck, Haluk Ertan.

“Turkey is now the headquarters of creationism in the Islamic World. This is no longer only Turkey’s problem, it is now the problem of the whole civilized world,” says Haluk Ertan, a professor of molecular biology at Istanbul University. He’s one of a handful of Turkish scientists who have been working to counter creationism’s spread in the country.

But if you package pseudoscience nicely enough, it will win.

In the past year, BAV has blanketed several European countries and the US with its glossy “Atlas of Creation,” a lavish 768-page tome weighing more than 13 pounds, sending it to scientists, professors, journalists, and schoolteachers…”Every Islamic bookshop I know of stocks Harun Yahya’s material. It is so glossily produced. It is very attractive and very colorful and outclasses everything else,” says Inayat Bunglawala…”It is having an effect. Even among Muslim medical students there are a number now who are speaking out against Darwin.”

Oh well, doctors don’t need to understand biology.

The series includes titles such as “The Dark Spell of Darwinism” and “Why Darwinism is Incompatible with the Koran.” Oktar’s brand of creationism is not only religious, but also political and even messianic, seeing most of the world’s ills – terrorism and fascism among them – as stemming from Darwin’s theory of evolution…”Folks, there is no such thing as what you call evolution. If there was, it would be in the Holy Bible or the Koran,” added Oktar…”Scientifically speaking, the whole Harun Yahya corpus is a bunch of nonsense, but it is unfortunately very popular,” says Taner Edis, a Turkish physicist who teaches at Truman State University in Missouri. Professor Edis says the success of the Harun Yahya books, at least in the Islamic world, can be attributed to a need for harmonizing modern life with traditional Islamic beliefs.

Sure. The success of a lot of bullshit and nonsense can be attributed to a need for harmonizing fundamentally incompatible things. That’s why people go in for bullshit and nonsense: because they want to harmonize things they want to believe with some obtrusive bit of reality. The reality won’t give way to prayers or persuasion or gentle little dances and passes in the air, so the only thing left to do is harmonize. Then once people get their teeth into harmonizing, they want to pass the harmonization on to schools and universities and the mass media, and pretty soon the entire population has learned that there’s no such thing as evolution because it’s not in the Koran. Maybe if we all work really hard, in a few generations the whole population of the earth will be as ignorant as it was ten thousand years ago. Yee-ha.

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