Bronze-level articleHarun Yahya

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==Challenge==
 
==Challenge==
In September 2008 he offered to pay out "10 trillion Turkish Lira<ref>Quite a lot</ref> to anyone who produces a single intermediate-form fossil demonstrating evolution" - he should bring his chequebook and take a trip to [http://www.lymeregismuseum.co.uk/fossils.htm Lyme Regis] for a day's Ammonite hunting.
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In September 2008 he offered to pay out "10 trillion Turkish Lira<ref>Quite a lot</ref> to anyone who produces a single intermediate-form fossil demonstrating evolution" - he should bring his chequebook and take a trip to [http://www.lymeregismuseum.co.uk/ Lyme Regis] for a day's Ammonite hunting.
 
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==Conviction==
 
==Conviction==

Revision as of 03:51, 20 December 2010

Goddidit!

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Harun Yahya is the pen name of Adnan Oktar, a Turkish Islamic old earth creationist anti-semite, Holocaust denier and criminal.[1] He has written several(!) books[2] on various topics including one in 2006 "Atlas of Creation" which attempts to damn evolution by demonstrating that various species are unchanged from their fossil ancestors. Unfortunately he fails at this through being unable to differentiate (for instance) sea snakes from eels, salamanders from frogs and flies from fishing lures![3]

So convinced is he of his rightness that he sent numerous free copies of this (Atlas of Creation) book to, among others, renowned zoologists and biologists worldwide, one of the "lucky" recipients was Richard Dawkins, who reviews the tome here in a less than flattering light. PZ Myers analyses his copy here.

In August 2008 he succeeded in getting Dawkins's website banned in Turkey.[4]

Contents

European attack

He has mailed copies of his book to schools in many European countries & is referred to many times in a document entitled: "The dangers of creationism in education" produced by the Council of Europe. Specific mentions of some of his errors are made in this document.

Harun Yahya's recycled arguments

Harun Yahya's attempts at positive arguments for creationism all seem to fall into much the same pattern.

  • Step one, which takes 90% or more of each essay, involves giving perfectly genuine scientific facts, copied from real scientists, concerning some aspect of nature. It really doesn't matter what - it can be anything from the metabolism of the koala[5] to mimicry in parrots[6] to the workings of the Venus Fly-Trap.[7]
  • Step two involves pretending that "Darwinists" claim that the natural world was produced by "coincidence", or "random chance". Yahya then points out that this can't possibly be the case, and concludes that therefore evolution is wrong.
  • Step three is to declare that since evolution is wrong, Allah made whatever it is that Yahya's discussing by a miracle.

He varies this formula very little: occasionally he skips straight from step one to step three without bothering with step two.[8]

The advantage of this method is that he can spend 90% of each essay copying out things which are actually true, which is a great way to pad out his essays, books, and DVDs. He requires only one lie - the huge, preposterous pretence that the theory of evolution ascribes the order and complexity of the natural world to "coincidences". This flimsy, clumsy misrepresentation of evolution can indeed be blown away by more or less any fact about the natural world. To quote the biologist and popularizer of evolution, Richard Dawkins:

It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn't work.
Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable

Besides attempts at the argument from design, Harun Yahya comes out with the usual creationist nonsense about intermediate forms, the standard pretense that "evolution is a religion",[9] the popular creationist myth that creationists are gaining ground[10] and the usual sorry ritual of blaming evolution for Nazism, for Communism, and in a feat of chutzpah unusual even in a creationist, for terrorism.[11] As this is the same stuff that every other creationist repeats, we presume that it is not the result of independent thought, but of copying off Christian fundamentalists and changing the word "Jesus" to "Allah" where necessary. As there is nothing original or even unusual in the arguments he recites, the reader will find all of his arguments listed, and debunked, in our index of creationist arguments

The one disadvantage of Yahya's technique is it is wholly unoriginal. He bases his arguments off of the creationist lies used over and over again, anyone who spends five minutes finding out what the theory of evolution actually is will realize that Yahya's essays are deceitful rubbish. Presumably he's betting on his followers lacking the intellectual integrity or curiosity to spend five minutes with a biology textbook; and, sadly, it appears that this gamble has paid off.

Challenge

In September 2008 he offered to pay out "10 trillion Turkish Lira[12] to anyone who produces a single intermediate-form fossil demonstrating evolution" - he should bring his chequebook and take a trip to Lyme Regis for a day's Ammonite hunting.

Conviction

After initially being acquitted in 2000 of heading a criminal organization - the practices of his institute apparently including extortion, specifically using girls to get wealthy young men in compromising positions and then blackmailing them - he was convicted and sentenced to three years imprisonment in 2008. He is - obviously - appealing. (Or fairly unappealing depending on your point of view.)

See also

Footnotes

  1. Guilty verdict - Reuters
  2. 214 at time of writing
  3. At least we can agree that fishing lures were created and did not evolve from live bait. We could even say that ones that get the job done very well are intelligently designed.
  4. Dawkins website banned in Turkey
  5. Yahya on the Koala
  6. Yahya on Parrots
  7. Yahya on the Venus Fly-Trap
  8. Yahya Golden Ratio
  9. Darwinism is not science
  10. Darwinism on the retreat
  11. Darwinism and Materialism
  12. Quite a lot
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