Evolution causes terrorism
Evolution causes terrorism! Or at least that’s what the lunatic Turkish creationist Harun Yahya claims. PZ Myers has more of the details, but basically, this creationist loon sent books to tens of thousands of French schools that make false and unsubstantiated claims like so:
The book features a photograph of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center with the caption: “Those who perpetuate terror in the world are in fact Darwinists. Darwinism is the only philosophy that values and incites conflict.”
Yes, really, it was evolution that caused the World Trade Center attacks. Not, God forbid, Islam. Hell, being fundamentalist Muslims, I’m sure those terrorists were all indoctrinated with evolution and went down praising Darwin, right? How can Harun Yahya blame a scientific theory for terrorism, especially when the actual terrorists don’t even believe in said scientific theory? It’s absolutely stupid. I’m sure even a fundamentalist Christian in the deep South would see the flaw in these claims. Science just explains how the world is. It would make just as much sense as a family of a suicide jumper blaming Newton and the laws of physics.
One thing to note is that Harun Yahya is actually the pen name of Adnan Oktar. I guess he’s so proud of what he’s doing he doesn’t want his real name too closely associated with it, huh? I first ran into Harun Yahya years back on talk.origins, when his followers would post his anti-evolution screeds verbatim, without attribution, using his pen name. Of course, these people often didn’t stick around to try to defend the writing when it was inevitably demolished by the talk.origins regulars, nor did they really understand enough of evolution to be able to offer up any coherent arguments. Harun Yahya’s followers just became known as losers on the local landscape, and were frequently derided and ignored rather than taken seriously. It’s too bad the same doesn’t happen with Harun Yahya in meatspace. It’s really a shame that millions of people are buying these books and believing in this nonsense.
February 5th, 2007 at 15:15
I think the way to demolish a philosophy is to invalidate its foundations one by one through evidence and proofs. Harun Yahya is utilizing this technique and is so successful in that so that his book is cencored. If he is wrong in his ideas there should have been scientific proofs to invalidate him. Cambrian explosion, complexity and harmony of parts working together in a cell, millions of fossills belonging to stable species all with complete systems, absence of intermediate forms.. all lead to the fact of creation and the collapse of the theory of evolution.
February 5th, 2007 at 18:05
He is wrong in his ideas, and they are all invalidated by the actual facts. He hasn’t been doing any scientific research himself, just making lots of nonsense claims. And if you’re honestly claiming an absence of intermediate forms, then I don’t think you’ve ever actually seen any sizable number of real fossils.
And one more thing. You can’t just introduce a lunatic idea and say that the burden of disproof rests with others. It doesn’t work like that. If you’re going to make such an outrageous claim as to say that evolution, rather than, say, fundamentalist Islam, caused 9/11, you had better damn well have something to back it up with. I don’t see any of that from you, nor from Harun Yahya.
February 6th, 2007 at 16:12
Yes, evolution caused terrorism: it also caused every other single human activity, because the fact is that humans evolved. It would be more accurate to just say “Humans cause terrorism” instead of saying a fact of nature did, however.
Yet to be even more accurate, one should say “Religious beliefs of humans cause terrorism.” I would hazzard a wager that most terrorists are Creationists humans, who therefore evolved, but it is silly to blame their evolving on their terrorism instead of their religious beliefs.
“Harun Yahya” appears to be a nut.
June 30th, 2008 at 16:46
Saw this in the random posts bit, and I’ll leave you with a quote from the movie The Mist.
“The human race is fundamentally insane. If you put two of us into a room together we’re soon gonna start figuring out good reasons to kill one another.”