riven0 challenged some of us (well, me, at least) to read Harun Yahya's supposedly devastating refutations of evolution. The links were a bit overwhelming but I found one that's not too hard to navigate and doesn't demand any money of me: http://www.evolutiondeceit.com/index.php
On the "THE AUTHOR" page, we find that his real name, apparently, is Adnan Oktar. "Harun Yahya", it says, is "formed from the names Harun (Aaron) and Yahya (John) in the esteemed memory of the two Prophets who struggled against infidelity". Well, at least he's admitting that he has a religious bias.
That page also lists a large number of books supposedly by the same author, books about Islamic creationism as well as more straightforwardly religious Islamic topics. Strangely, one of his books is not listed with those: Holocaust Deception: An Islamic History of the Nazi-Zionist Nexus -- http://www.noontidepress.com/catalog/0247.html ...but we'll let someone else deal with this fellow's Holocaust denial. Here, let us be content for now to look at his evolution denial.
I'm going to go through the online book, chapter by chapter (no, relax: I don't mean that I'm going to quote the whole book here, although I will do some summarizing), and I'm going to post my comments as I go.
To start with, the first two chapters only (it's late).
The first chapter, "INTRODUCTION: WHY THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION?", can be dismissed rather quickly. It's merely a rant against materialism, blaming materialism for everything from communism to fascism and even, strangely, religious terrorists. Even if we could blame Darwinism and materialism for bringing misery and death to the world, I don't see that that would say anything at all about the validity or truth of evolution (just as my mentioning that the author of this work also wrote a book denying the holocaust may not necessarily mean that he's got no valid arguments against evolution).
The second chapter, "TO BE FREED FROM PREJUDICE", rehashes argument from design. If we found three bricks on top of each other, would we "suppose that these bricks had come together by chance and then climbed up on top of each other, again by chance"? He is saying that we are prejudiced against a divine explanation and so we stubbornly cling to evolution.
He also states that there are two possible views, God created complex living things as they are or that "that life was formed by unconscious, random coincidences. The latter is the claim of the theory of evolution." He has an inset photo of Michael Behe, whose "irreducible complexity" has been soundly debunked elsewhere (if that needs to be discussed, I suggest that someone should start a new thread for it).
He promises to demonstrate in future chapterse that "there is no chance whatsoever that a single living cell-or even one of the millions of proteins present in this cell-could have come into existence by chance as the evolutionists claim". He declares that he will demonstrate through probabilisitic calculations that there is a 0% chance that "the evolutionist view on the emergence of living beings" is true and that, therefore, his creationist view has a 100% chance of being true.
One is tempted to shout "false dilemma!" but let's carry on.
In other words, because he believes that it is absolutely impossible for abiogenesis to have occurred, he concludes that it is a proven fact that God exists. Wait! I thought he was talking about evolution but, so far, he's talked only about materialism and abiogenesis. I guess he's not especially worried about getting his scientific terms straight. After all, his primary concern appears to be not with science but with "the struggle against infidelity".
In the next section of the chapter, "Blind Materialism", he again cites evolution as the basis of materialism. He gives us a short quote from a Turkist scientist in which that scientist appears to prefer an event with a probability of zero than to accept divine intervention as an explanation. There is a footnote. If one someone here wants to go check it out and read, probably in Turkish, the original document, we might be able to get the whole context.
I'm sure we're all sufficiently familiar with creationist tactics to not trust short quotes that appear to show "evolutionists" being foolish or dishonest.
He also quotes Behe, and goes on to claim that scientists stubbornly cling to evolution and materialism even though "All the scientific research carried out by these people demonstrates to them the existence of a Creator."
He's made many claims. He promises to, in the rest of the book review the scientific findings that disprove evolution. He promises that we will "witness that evolution theory is in fact a deceit-a deceit that is belied by science at every step but is upheld to veil the fact of creation."
How exciting! ...now, I must get some sleep.
On the "THE AUTHOR" page, we find that his real name, apparently, is Adnan Oktar. "Harun Yahya", it says, is "formed from the names Harun (Aaron) and Yahya (John) in the esteemed memory of the two Prophets who struggled against infidelity". Well, at least he's admitting that he has a religious bias.
That page also lists a large number of books supposedly by the same author, books about Islamic creationism as well as more straightforwardly religious Islamic topics. Strangely, one of his books is not listed with those: Holocaust Deception: An Islamic History of the Nazi-Zionist Nexus -- http://www.noontidepress.com/catalog/0247.html ...but we'll let someone else deal with this fellow's Holocaust denial. Here, let us be content for now to look at his evolution denial.
I'm going to go through the online book, chapter by chapter (no, relax: I don't mean that I'm going to quote the whole book here, although I will do some summarizing), and I'm going to post my comments as I go.
To start with, the first two chapters only (it's late).
The first chapter, "INTRODUCTION: WHY THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION?", can be dismissed rather quickly. It's merely a rant against materialism, blaming materialism for everything from communism to fascism and even, strangely, religious terrorists. Even if we could blame Darwinism and materialism for bringing misery and death to the world, I don't see that that would say anything at all about the validity or truth of evolution (just as my mentioning that the author of this work also wrote a book denying the holocaust may not necessarily mean that he's got no valid arguments against evolution).
The second chapter, "TO BE FREED FROM PREJUDICE", rehashes argument from design. If we found three bricks on top of each other, would we "suppose that these bricks had come together by chance and then climbed up on top of each other, again by chance"? He is saying that we are prejudiced against a divine explanation and so we stubbornly cling to evolution.
He also states that there are two possible views, God created complex living things as they are or that "that life was formed by unconscious, random coincidences. The latter is the claim of the theory of evolution." He has an inset photo of Michael Behe, whose "irreducible complexity" has been soundly debunked elsewhere (if that needs to be discussed, I suggest that someone should start a new thread for it).
He promises to demonstrate in future chapterse that "there is no chance whatsoever that a single living cell-or even one of the millions of proteins present in this cell-could have come into existence by chance as the evolutionists claim". He declares that he will demonstrate through probabilisitic calculations that there is a 0% chance that "the evolutionist view on the emergence of living beings" is true and that, therefore, his creationist view has a 100% chance of being true.
One is tempted to shout "false dilemma!" but let's carry on.
In other words, because he believes that it is absolutely impossible for abiogenesis to have occurred, he concludes that it is a proven fact that God exists. Wait! I thought he was talking about evolution but, so far, he's talked only about materialism and abiogenesis. I guess he's not especially worried about getting his scientific terms straight. After all, his primary concern appears to be not with science but with "the struggle against infidelity".
In the next section of the chapter, "Blind Materialism", he again cites evolution as the basis of materialism. He gives us a short quote from a Turkist scientist in which that scientist appears to prefer an event with a probability of zero than to accept divine intervention as an explanation. There is a footnote. If one someone here wants to go check it out and read, probably in Turkish, the original document, we might be able to get the whole context.
I'm sure we're all sufficiently familiar with creationist tactics to not trust short quotes that appear to show "evolutionists" being foolish or dishonest.He also quotes Behe, and goes on to claim that scientists stubbornly cling to evolution and materialism even though "All the scientific research carried out by these people demonstrates to them the existence of a Creator."
He's made many claims. He promises to, in the rest of the book review the scientific findings that disprove evolution. He promises that we will "witness that evolution theory is in fact a deceit-a deceit that is belied by science at every step but is upheld to veil the fact of creation."
How exciting! ...now, I must get some sleep.
