An American children’s website called Kids 4 Truth features a beautiful animated sequence in which scraps of metal fall from the sky. These scraps then mysteriously turn themselves into cogs and dials that slot together by chance into a fully functioning pocket watch.1 As this happens, the narrator reads a little verse:
‘Ridiculous story!’
You say with a grin.
‘Impossible, laughable,
Surely a sin!’
This is a Creationist website. The animation is based on the ‘watchmaker’ analogy devised by the eighteenth-century English philosopher William Paley. If you found a watch by the side of the road, he said, its complexity would tell you that someone had designed it. The universe is infinitely more complicated than a watch, ergo it was designed. Modern philosophers and theologians regard Paley’s argument as hopelessly naive, but Creationists still accept it. By showing the watch spookily assembling itself by accident, Kids 4 Truth are mocking the Darwinian argument that nature works without divine intervention. They do indeed believe that the theory of evolution is ‘surely a sin’.
The next thing we see is an animated biological cell, depicted in all its complexity. The verse continues:
Now the doctors from Oxford
Say cells came by chance
From Goo down to You
In a beautiful dance.
What’s wrong with their thinking
To have such odd notions,
That cells could just happen
From dirt and warm oceans?
The analogy between Paley’s watch and a cell is significant. It shows that Kids 4 Truth are familiar with the most sophisticated and up-to-date argument for Creationism: Intelligent Design.
This term, often referred to simply as ID, entered the scientific vocabulary in about 1990. Initially, it was employed by the authors of Creationist textbooks as an alternative to ‘Creation science’, the teaching of which in state schools was declared unconstitutional by a Supreme Court ruling in 1987 on the grounds that it breached the separation of church and state.2 But it soon took on a life of its own, developing into an ingenious series of refutations of the theory of evolution through natural selection–so ingenious, in fact, that some commentators thought Charles Darwin’s ideas would soon be written off as just another Victorian eccentricity.
Nearly two decades later, Intelligent Design is still winning educated converts. Even its opponents concede that it cannot be dismissed as the propaganda of semi-educated Christian fundamentalists. Its best-known exponent, Michael Behe, is professor of biochemical sciences at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania. Another leading advocate is William Dembski, a brilliant American mathematician. Lots of supporters of ID are not Christians at all.
In 1996, Behe published a best-selling book called Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, based around the proposition that ‘systems of horrendous, irreducible complexity inhabit a cell’.3 That sounds uncontroversial, but it isn’t. The key word here is ‘irreducible’, which is intended to bring the whole edifice of Darwinian theory crashing down.
An irreducibly complex system is one that cannot work if even one of its components is removed or slightly altered. Only when all the components are in place and working properly does the system work; therefore it cannot have evolved, because it is functionally useless until the last piece of the jigsaw is in place.
Behe uses the analogy of a mousetrap, which might seem like a simple device but is actually irreducibly complex in the sense that it works only when everything is in place. Imagine an alternative reality in which mouse-control devices could evolve through random mutation. There would be no reason for a half-evolved mousetrap to develop into a three-quarters-evolved mousetrap, because the latter would be as useless as the former. The fact that the trap catches mice must mean that it was designed with its function in mind.4 And what is true of mousetraps is also true of other ‘irreducibly complex’ systems, such as the human immune system or even the single cell. Behe’s conclusion: life itself was designed by an intelligent agent.
All of which sounds plausible enough to the layman. But not a single world-class scientist in the fields of evolutionary biology, physics or geology is persuaded by the mousetrap analogy (we shall see why later). Not one has endorsed Intelligent Design. In September 2005, thirty-eight Nobel laureates wrote to the Kansas State Board of Education begging it not to allow ID to be taught in science classes. The signatories included the vast majority of the winners of the Nobel Prizes for physics, chemistry and medicine over the previous five years.5
The US National Academy of Sciences has said that ‘Intelligent Design and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life’ are not science because they cannot be tested by experiment, do not generate any predictions, and propose no new hypotheses of their own.6 And in December 2005, US district judge John E. Jones ruled that the Dover area school board in Pennsylvania–the first in the country to insert ID into a science curriculum–had clearly violated the constitutional separation of church and state. Jones, a churchgoing Republican, described ID as ‘a religious view, a mere relabelling of Creationism and not a scientific theory’.7
Intelligent Design is an important example of counterknowledge, not only because it masquerades so confidently as knowledge, but also because we can trace its evolution from much more primitive forms of belief. ID grew out of ‘scientific Creationism’ (in which bogus archaeology and bogus geology try to demonstrate the literal truth of Genesis), which in turn grew out of old-fashioned Bible-bashing Creationism. But, far from becoming extinct, those primitive forms are interbreeding with ID to produce new varieties of Creationism that combine religious fundamentalism and pseudo-science.
But hang on, you might say: how can I be confident that ID is counterknowledge when many of Behe’s arguments–which involve the locking together of amino acids and nucleotides and the intricacies of biosynthetic pathways–are too technical for me to follow? My answer is that I am doing something deeply unfashionable: I am taking the word of scientists on trust.
There are good reasons to trust scientists whenever a huge majority of them endorse an empirical claim. The tests applied to empirical statements are, for the most part, impressively rigorous, and they are applied by a scientific community that (unlike that of Creationists) is made up of individuals from diverse ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds. Advances in technology and methodology have greatly increased our ability to identify regularities in nature through repeated observation–the essence of scientific endeavour.8 Of course, from time to time scientists arrive at the wrong explanation of natural phenomena; but these mistakes are usually rectified by later hypotheses that better fit the data. So, when scrupulous researchers overwhelmingly agree that a particular claim is a statement of fact, the probability that they are right is extremely high.
Does that sound naive? It shouldn’t. Nothing could be more reasonable than insisting that people measure the evidence of their senses in the most painstaking and nit-picking ways they can devise.
When scientists disagree with each other, that trust inevitably starts to evaporate. If the scientific community is seriously divided on a subject and we want to form an opinion, we must do at least some of the hard work of sifting evidence for ourselves. But, to pick an example at random, we don’t need to choose whether to believe that plants make sugar from sunlight through photosynthesis; scientists know how this extremely complicated biochemical process works, and the rest of us happily absorb a simplified explanation of it in the classroom. There may be a maverick scientist somewhere who thinks plants absorb most of their energy from moonlight, but we can safely ignore his thesis because scientists have already sifted through a mass of contradictory evidence.
Let us return to the subject of evolution. The idea that all complex life forms developed from simpler life forms, and that all organisms are in some way related, is only a ‘theory’ in the sense that no empirical proposition can ever be 100 per cent proven. In the words of John Dupré, professor of philosophy of science at Exeter University, the core propositions of the theory of evolution ‘are as unquestionably true as anything that science has established’.9 As true as photosynthesis, if you like.
Dupré divides the converging evidence supporting evolution (also called ‘descent with modification’) into three areas. First, there is the physiological evidence of related structures. The fore-limbs of all mammals–the bat’s wing, the whale’s flipper, the human arm–share exactly the same arrangement of bones, even though they serve different purposes. Also, all organisms share the same relations between DNA sequences and the structure of amino acids. ‘The overwhelmingly compelling explanation of this and countless parallel examples is descent from common ancestors,’ says Dupré. Second, there is the evidence of fossils, whose pattern of descent is wholly consistent with the pattern of relationship suggested by physiological comparisons. Third, there is biogeography, the distribution of different species in which patterns of evolution match patterns of migration, as Darwin discovered after studying finches in the Galapagos Islands.10
Moreover, evolution can explain so-called irreducible complexity. Behe’s ingenious mousetrap analogy falls apart on closer examination. Robert Ehrlich, professor of physics at George Mason University, Virginia, has shown how, theoretically, mouse-control devices could evolve into a mousetrap. His explanation is complicated–but, then, so is evolution. Essentially, it involves different parts of the device changing shape for different reasons. At various points these mutations would act, singly or together, to change the property of the whole device. Eventually, it might–might–evolve into a mousetrap as a result of an enormous number of mutations, none of which has any particular ‘goal’.11
So natural evolution is a fact. We can safely describe it as such because the probability that it is untrue is so small. Scientists disagree about the respective importance of selection and random mutation, and there is a separate dispute about the meaning of gaps in the fossil record. The late Stephen Jay Gould proposed that these gaps reflected sudden bursts of evolution; other scientists maintain that the gaps were caused by the way the rocks were formed. Moreover, there have also been some vicious disputes about the social implications of evolution–vicious enough for Andrew Brown to entitle his book on the controversy The Darwin Wars.12
These ‘Darwin wars’ are, however, fought between scientists who accept descent through modification as true. The battle between evolution and Intelligent Design belongs to another war altogether: one between science and religiously inspired pseudoscience.
Intelligent Design is not science because, as the US National Academy of Sciences points out, its propositions are not falsifiable: there is no way to test them. It is not quite theology either, but it is predicated on belief in some sort of deity. Although Behe and his colleagues deliberately say nothing about the identity of the creator of life and how or why he/she/it went about the project, ID has been embraced almost exclusively by Christians, Muslims and other monotheists. The movement likes to think of its critics as atheist scientists whose intellects are too narrow to contemplate the possibility that the universe was designed for a purpose.
Some biologists, such as Richard Dawkins, are indeed proselytizing atheists. But many others are Christians who argue that, since evolutionary theory cannot explain the original act of Creation, there is no objection to believing that God created matter and then worked through natural evolution. Also, most Christian theologians and clergy agree with them. ‘Theistic evolution’ is the default position of mainstream Christianity. The proportion of members of the Church of England’s General Synod who accept evolution is almost certainly much higher than that in the English population at large.
What about the Roman Catholic Church? The story of the Vatican’s flirtation with Intelligent Design is very revealing. Even in the late nineteenth century, the Catholic Church was less uniformly hostile than conservative Protestantism towards the theory of evolution. In 1909, the Pontifical Biblical Commission issued a decree that allowed Catholics to interpret the ‘days’ in the Book of Genesis as representing indefinite periods of time. As Don O’Leary, the historian of Catholicism and science, notes: ‘This was of major significance when arguing that God worked through secondary causes when creating the heavens and the earth.’13
Versions of the theory of evolution were accepted by many Catholic theologians during the twentieth century, but it was not until 1996 that Darwin received qualified papal approval. In that year, Pope John Paul II described evolution as ‘no longer a mere hypothesis’. The pope said: ‘It is indeed remarkable that this theory [of evolution] has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favour of this theory.’14 Michael Behe is himself a Catholic, so one can imagine his horror at this statement.
Under the papacy of Benedict XVI, however, the situation has become confused. In July 2005, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, a close ally of Pope Benedict and a possible future pope, wrote in the New York Times: ‘Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense–an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection–is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.’15
Catholic scientists were aghast. Where was this overwhelming evidence? Schönborn appeared to have signed up to Intelligent Design. He had been encouraged and helped to write his essay by Mark Ryland, a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute of Seattle’s Center for Science and Culture, the most important organization in the Intelligent Design movement; Behe is another senior fellow. For one of the Catholic Church’s most intellectually gifted cardinals to pronounce against the Darwinian consensus was a real triumph.
The outcry from scientists was such that, soon afterwards, Schönborn clarified his remarks. Evolutionary theory was not incompatible with belief in God, he said, so long as scientists do not overstep the boundaries of their discipline and claim that ‘everything…from the Big Bang to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony…is principally, exclusively and irrevocably seen as a product of chance’.16
Schönborn’s revised opinion was compatible with theistic evolution; he appeared to have backed away from supporting ID. Even so, the whole business unnerved Catholic scientists who had been delighted by John Paul II’s support for the theory of evolution. Matters were further confused in November 2005 when Pope Benedict said in off-the-cuff remarks that Creation was an ‘intelligent project’ and criticized those who said that it was ‘without direction’. These comments were consistent with theistic evolution and Intelligent Design, though the consensus among Catholic commentators is that Benedict does not endorse ID. In January 2006, an article appeared in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano arguing that ID is not science; but the article, although approved by church officials, was not a statement of policy.17
The truth is that the Vatican had come within a whisker of endorsing pseudoscience, thus creating precisely the sort of conflict between faith and reason that the modern church has tried to avoid.
Perhaps if Cardinal Schönborn had spent more time studying the antecedents and allies of Intelligent Design he would have thought twice before endorsing it. Like so many varieties of counterknowledge, ID forms part of a whole ecosystem in which information from the cultic milieu mutates into a form that can survive in the mainstream. Or, to use another metaphor, ID is the Trojan horse of renascent Creationism.
The spokesmen for Intelligent Design tend not to be fundamentalist Christians whose literal reading of Genesis leads them to conclude that the earth is 6,000 years old. But there is no copyright on the concept of Intelligent Design, and ‘young-earth’ Creationists frequently invoke its arguments.18
ID has been appropriated by the Institute for Creation Research, the major organ of young-earth ‘scientific Creationism’, which teaches that the doctrine of evolution has inspired communism, imperialism, bestiality, infanticide, slavery and child abuse. The Institute’s website links Intelligent Design and ‘Flood geology’, arguing that fossil deposits left by Noah’s Flood reveal the ‘ordering principle’ discovered by Behe et al.19 And, as we shall see, the Islamic world has also latched on to Intelligent Design.
Creationism in general is flourishing in America, in both its crudest and its most sophisticated varieties. President George W. Bush, while not endorsing Intelligent Design, has suggested, to his shame, that it could be discussed as a scientific theory in state schools. A 2004 Gallup poll found that around 45 per cent of Americans believe that God created human beings in their present form about 10,000 years ago. So about 100 million adult Americans are ignorant of the origins of human life. (Anatomically modern humans are at least 100,000 years old.) But the really shocking thing about this statistic is that the proportion of scientifically illiterate respondents has not changed significantly, and may even have risen, since the question was first asked in 1982.20
Why should this be the case, in a country in which the teaching of Creationism in science lessons is unconstitutional because it breaches the separation of church and state? The growth of the religious right is often mentioned as a factor; but there is no evidence that there has been a growth in fundamentalist churches for which hard-line Creationism is a test of theological correctness. Even in conservative Christian universities very few science faculties are prepared to teach young-earth Creationism, or even Intelligent Design.
The continued vigour of Creationism owes more to technology than to traditional religious revivalism. Independent sources create custom-designed material that shoots through cyberspace and the ether, where it is picked up by ordinary people, religious and ethnic minorities, oddballs, cultists, maverick academics and fanatics.
We should not be surprised. In the modern world, counterknowledge is far more likely to be packaged as entertainment or as a user-friendly learning experience than as a stern lecture. Bogus information can even provide a fun day out for all the family, as Alec Russell of the Daily Telegraph discovered when he was given a preview of the world’s first Creation Museum in Ohio, which opened in 2007.
Russell was shown animatronic children and dinosaurs playing together in the Garden of Eden. His guide, Ken Ham, from the fast-growing young-earth organization Answers in Genesis, explained that dinosaurs survived Noah’s Flood and roamed the earth until quite recently. ‘There are dragon legends all over the world. Why? Because they have a basis in truth, a basis in real animals. So, even though the word dinosaur wasn’t coined until 1841, we would say that it’s very possible that what people today call dinosaurs were known as dragons.’ But how did they manage to fit such gigantic creatures on to Noah’s Ark? ‘They only took young dinosaurs on board,’ says Ham.
Russell describes the Creation Museum as a place that Americans who reject evolution ‘can visit for a jolly family weekend, while having their views reinforced in a series of exhibitions, displays and films which argue that evolutionary science is no more than a fairy tale’.21 I would go further, and say that audience-targeting attractions such as the museum can turn Christians who are vaguely opposed to evolution into Creationists, just as other forms of ‘infotainment’ turn natural sceptics into conspiracy theorists.
Technological expertise is crucial; the museum’s creative director used to design sets for Universal Studios in Hollywood. The transformation of America into what the cultural critic Neal Gabler calls a ‘republic of entertainment’, in which the primary purpose of information is to stimulate the senses and the imagination, greatly increases receptivity to counterknowledge. The Creation Museum has borrowed animatronics from Jurassic Park to propagate its own fiction; one fiction has inspired another.
New technology is egalitarian; it is good at dismantling hierarchies of knowledge. Anyone with the appropriate expertise can redesign and then market counterknowledge in ways that appeal to an audience that cares more about presentation than content. Creationist websites are more colourful, accessible and numerous than those that explain how evolution works. If you typed ‘Creation’ into the Google search engine in March 2007, the second of 308 million results, beaten only by a nightclub called Creation, was Kids 4 Truth–Creation, describing itself as ‘a multimedia blast’.22 And that last claim is certainly accurate: the site is a blast, a collection of cute, child-friendly Flash ‘dynamations’.
As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, Kids 4 Truth makes use of the ID concept of irreducible complexity. But, groovy graphics notwithstanding, it also reflects the views of the most unyielding young-earth Creationists–fundamentalist Protestants who think that even Behe is probably going to Hell because he is a Roman Catholic. Kids 4 Truth believes in a literal 144-hour creation of the world; a more accurate name for the organization might be Kids 4 Untruth. Churches can sign up to the package, buy the Powerpoint presentations and graphic tools and set up Kids 4 Truth clubs, so long as they agree not to deviate from the strict teaching programme, described as a ‘catechism on steroids’. But any parents can encourage their children to add the Kids 4 Truth site to their bookmarks.
The organization behind the website is the Servant Christian Community Foundation, a Kansas-based charitable organization that specializes in advising Christians on tax-efficient ways of funding the spread of the Gospel. But there are several different contributors to Kids 4 Truth, and overall it operates more as a coalition of fundamentalist ministries than as a single structure. And this is true of so much internet-driven counterknowledge: individual sites, however carefully policed, are essentially portals on to a world view.
A spectacular illustration of this approach is CreationWiki, a Creationist alternative to the web encyclopedia Wikipedia, which by 2007 had assembled over 2,500 articles written from a young-earth perspective.23 In March 2007, the main article flagged on the home page was about the eruption at Mount St Helens, Washington, on 18 May 1980, which killed fifty-seven people–the deadliest volcanic event in the history of the United States. According to the article, the Mount St Helens eruption created thick deposits of sedimentary rock that were very rapidly eroded into canyons. Therefore the Grand Canyon, instead of being carved out over millions of years by the Colorado River, as geologists believe, could have been created by an ‘event’ as recent as Noah’s Flood.24
The authority for this claim is Dr Steve Austin, chairman of the department of geology at the Institute for Creation Research Graduate School. Some of Austin’s analysis of lava flows is far too technical for a layman to evaluate. However, he has been unable to cite a single article in a peer-reviewed journal in support of his Mount St Helens thesis. His critics, on the other hand, have raised innumerable scientific objections to it, one of the most striking of which is that there is a huge difference between the ‘sedimentary rock’ (actually volcanic ash) deposited by the St Helens eruption and true sedimentary rocks, such as limestone or sandstone, for which there is no evidence of rapid deposition and erosion at the Grand Canyon or anywhere else.
The number of professional geologists who believe that the Mount St Helens eruption provides fresh evidence of Noah’s Flood is the same as the number of Nobel Prize winners who believe in Intelligent Design: zero. The Wikipedia and CreationWiki entries for Mount St Helens represent knowledge versus counterknowledge. Yet the layout of the web pages is identical, down to the point size and colour of the font. That is because the software that powers Wikipedia is in the public domain and can be used by anyone to build another encyclopedia.
‘Free culture knows no bounds,’ says Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. ‘We welcome the reuse of our work to build variants. That’s directly in line with our mission.’25 Wikipedia itself is, by its nature, unreliable; a fair amount of counterknowledge creeps into its database every day. But, so long as its users are aware of its serious limitations, it is a useful resource. The purpose of CreationWiki and another anti-evolution rival, Conservapedia, is to dress up nonsense as science.
Wales is right in one respect: the ‘free culture’ of the internet does not recognize the bounds between information and misinformation, and it is also increasing the permeability of different bodies of counterknowledge. Once again, Creationism is a good example of this process. The anonymity of cyberspace allows the largest body of Creationists in the world, Muslims, to absorb useful ideas from Christian opponents of evolution.
Muslims are not young-earthers, since the idea that the world is 6,000 years old is extracted from genealogies in the Old Testament and is therefore explicitly Judaeo-Christian. So Islamic Creationists cannot use overtly Christian material from the Institute for Creation Research (though they happily plunder that material for ideas). The argument for Intelligent Design, on the other hand, can easily be adapted by Muslims because it restricts its theology to the notion of a divine designer, who could just as easily be Allah as the Trinitarian God of the Christians. ‘Intelligent Design is not alien to Islam,’ writes the Turkish political scientist Mustafa Akyol. ‘It is very much our cause and we should do everything we can to support it.’
Islamonline.net is a widely read Islamic website run by the Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a ‘moderate’ Muslim who strongly supports Palestinian suicide bombings.26 The site has issued a ‘Call for Action’ to Muslims, written by Akyol, asking them to spread the message of Intelligent Design. It tells students: ‘Go and learn about Intelligent Design. Learn why Darwinism is wrong. Then raise this issue in your classrooms. Question your biology teachers and your textbooks. Form Muslim Student Associations and get in touch with the Intelligent Design groups in your area. Organize lectures by ID scientists and write under the title “The Fall of Darwinism: The Greatest Myth Ever”.’ Muslim parents are told: ‘If you have children in schools, pay attention to their biology classes. Are they being indoctrinated by the myths of Darwinism? If so, appeal to their school board and question this theory by appealing to the world of the ID scientists. Get help from Christian families who support the Intelligent Design cause.’27
Islamic Creationism is turning into a serious problem for British sixth-form colleges and universities–not just because Creationism is incompatible with biological science, but also because educational establishments are anxious not to offend ethnic-minority pupils and parents.
According to a February 2006 report in the Guardian, at one (unnamed) sixth-form college in London ‘most biology students are thought to be Creationists’.28 The report, in a left-leaning newspaper that is traditionally much quicker to criticize evangelical Christians than Muslims, implied rather than stated that the students were Muslim. But anyone familiar with education in London knows that Pakistani Muslim students taking biology A-levels en route to becoming doctors, dentists or scientists vastly outnumber fundamentalist Christians with the same ambition. A biology teacher at the college was quoted as saying: ‘The vast majority of my students now believe in Creationism, and these are thinking young people who are able and articulate and not at the dim end at all.’
A 2006 poll of UK higher education students showed that less than 10 per cent of Muslims accepted the theory of evolution.29 This survey was also reported by the Guardian, although the way the findings were presented glossed over the implication that students who identified themselves as Muslims were far more anti-evolution than those who identified themselves as Christians. The newspaper quoted Roger Downie, professor of zoology at Glasgow University, who was alarmed by the number of his own students who were Creationists, and blamed schools for not teaching science properly: ‘The impression people get is that science is about accumulating a lot of facts in your head rather than testing of evidence and fine-tuning what you find.’
Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, has spent twenty years visiting schools to talk about evolutionary biology. For the first ten years, only about one student in 1,000 expressed Creationist beliefs. ‘Now, in any school I go to, I meet a student who says they are a Creationist or delude themselves that they are,’ he says.30
In 2006, Muslim medical students at Guy’s Hospital in London distributed leaflets attacking Darwinism as part of the Islam Awareness Week. Professors of medicine and biology are expressing deep concern that people who are soon to be doctors reject so many of the fundamental discoveries of biological science. Typically, however, these expressions of concern are either unattributable (because they might open the speaker to the charge of Islamophobia) or balanced by attacks on the soft target of American fundamentalism. Jones describes British Creationism as ‘an insidious and growing problem…Irrationality is a very infectious disease, as we see from the United States.’
That dig at America is misleading; Muslim Creationism is a far more efficient carrier of irrationality than American Christian fundamentalism. It is true that in Muslim countries there are no theme parks showing baby dinosaurs romping with children; but nor is there a Supreme Court that forbids the teaching of religious belief in science lessons. Yes, it is a scandal that the proportion of the American public that rejects evolution has not fallen in the last twenty years; and it is true that the millions of Americans who regard Darwinism as a conspiracy are also susceptible to other ignorant conspiracy theories. But the Institute for Creation Research is still essentially located in the American cultic milieu; although it makes use of the arguments of the Intelligent Design movement, the latter is careful not to endorse the ICR’s absurd young-earth beliefs. Islamic Creationism, by contrast, is a unified and increasingly influential component of a wider Islamic world view that embraces and propagates counterknowledge.
One reason why the new Islamic Creationism is unified is that, to a remarkable degree, it is the product of one man (or possibly several people posing as one man). He writes as Harun Yahya, but his real name, according to his own website, is Adnan Oktar. This self-styled ‘prominent Turkish intellectual’ was born in 1956, studied at Mimar Sinan University, and boasts that he is ‘even more expert’ in Western materialist philosophy than its advocates. In recent years, he says, his ‘dedicated effort against Darwinism has grown to be a worldwide phenomenon’.31
Yahya’s documentaries are shown by independent or government-run television channels in Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Tanzania, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan and Bosnia, and by satellite to Muslims in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States. His material has been translated into fifty-one languages. In my local Islamic bookshop in west London, all the books on Creationism–indeed, nearly all the books on biological science–are by Yahya and are produced by one of the publishing houses owned by his Foundation for Scientific Research, the Turkish acronym of which is BAV.
Although Yahya rejects the term ‘Intelligent Design’ as un-Islamic, his more sophisticated writings, such as The Miracle of Hormones (2004),32 are heavily influenced by the ID notion of irreducible complexity. The BAV also produces an impressively glossy 800-page Atlas of Creation, which has been distributed, unsolicited, to schools and colleges around the world; in early 2007 the French education ministry warned schools against the book after several thousand copies arrived in the country, apparently directed at France’s large Muslim minority.33 The atlas tries to deny evolution by showing that today’s animals look exactly like their fossilized ancestors, and also says that Darwinism was the inspiration behind the Third Reich and modern terrorism. This is a familiar theme of Yahya’s, and brings us to what we might term his less sophisticated writings.
For Yahya, Darwinism is one of the most evil teachings of the ‘dark clan’, which he describes as ‘a web-like structure with offshoots in every country, orchestrating the moral degeneration of today’s world’.34 Freemasons, Nazis, Zionists, drug barons, homosexuals, Buddhists, prostitutes, evolutionary biologists–all are caught up in a global conspiracy whose motto is Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’. (There are unmistakable echoes here of the fundamentalist Christian conspiracy theories of the Institute for Creation Research, which also associates Darwinism with crime and sexual perversion.)
Very few stretches of the cultic milieu are out of bounds to Yahya, as a visit to his website confirms. Harunyahya.com, in addition to offering free downloads of all the author’s books, links to forty-two websites based on his work. A site exposing the ‘lie’ of the Stone Age (thestoneage.org) explains that primitive man never existed: ‘For example, Prophet Noah (pbuh) knew boat-building technology, for we know from the Qur’an that his ark was steam-powered.’ Another of Yahya’s sites, Globalfreemasonry.com, borrows wholesale the fanciful theory of British ‘historians’ Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas that the secrets of Freemasonry can be traced back to ancient Egypt via the Knights Templar.35 Yahya also cites the ‘famous British historian’ Nesta Webster (1876–1960), a paranoid anti-Semite who was partly responsible for introducing the British public to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.36 Meanwhile, truthforkids.com, aimed at children, is the Islamic equivalent of the Christian fundamentalist Kids 4 Truth.
Just as traditional counterknowledge mimics the structure and style of genuine knowledge rather than its content, newer digital entrepreneurs raid cyberspace for recognizable designs. CreationWiki models itself on Wikipedia. Yahya and the BAV borrow heavily from Western websites: their online bookshop looks like Amazon.com. Cloning a ‘respectable’ website is far easier than producing a book that looks as if it emanates from a major publisher.
As it happens, Islamic Creationists have enough resources to do both. No one is quite sure why this movement should have sprung up in Turkey, officially a secular state, and no one has publicly identified the source of the BAV’s very substantial funds. The BAV has organized Creationist conferences in over 100 Turkish cities and towns; by 2006 it had opened more than eighty ‘museums’ of Creationism in restaurants, shopping malls and city halls across the country, featuring portraits of Charles Darwin framed in dripping blood.37
According to a Reuters report in 2006, Turkish Creationism ‘has an influence US Creationists could only dream of’. Pious Muslims in the government have managed to cut back the time allotted for the discussion of evolution in biology classes, reducing it to the status of a contested nineteenth-century theory; in a survey of public acceptance of evolution in thirty-four countries, Turkey, which is pushing hard to join the European Union, came last.38 ‘Darwinism is dying in Turkey thanks to us,’ says BAV’s director, Tarkan Yavas. ‘Darwinism breeds immorality, and an immoral Turkey is of no use to the European Union.’39 In August 2007, Harun Yahya, a.k.a. Adnan Oktar, succeeded in persuading the Turkish courts to block access to WordPress.com, home of the world’s leading blogging software, because it was being used by critics of Creationism who had allegedly libelled him. In other words, the whole of Turkey was prevented from accessing the site and every blog hosted by it.40
The situation in the rest of the Islamic world is just as depressing. Creationism has not so far been an important issue in Arab countries because the teaching of science is so perfunctory that Darwin’s theories have scarcely registered. But, in their attempts to interest Muslims in ‘Creation science’ via the internet, Yahya and Akyol are pushing at an open door.
In Indonesia, Pakistan and Egypt, the proportion of the population that believes in Darwin’s theory of evolution is 2, 5 and 3 per cent, respectively; only in secular Kazakhstan does the figure rise as high as 10 per cent.41 Meanwhile, as the Economist reported in April 2007, Creationism is gaining ground in non-Muslim parts of Africa and the former Soviet Union. In Kenya, evangelical Christians are bitterly opposing plans to put on display Turkana Boy, the most complete skeleton of Homo erectus ever found, because they do not believe that Homo erectus existed. In Russia, the Moscow patriarchate of the Orthodox Church has attacked Darwin and supported the teaching of alternatives to evolution in schools.42 Even the Indian New Age guru Deepak Chopra has revealed himself to be an Intelligent Design Creationist. Writing in the Huffington Post in 2005, he sought to elevate the debate over evolution to a ‘higher plane’ by listing various problems that biologists have failed to address. For example: ‘Why are life forms beautiful? Non-beautiful creatures have survived for millions of years, so have beautiful ones. The notion that this is random seems weak.’ What the myopic biological scientists are failing to grasp, adds Chopra, is that the universe itself knows what it is doing. ‘Consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of all information in the universe.’43
Chopra, who has a significant following among middle-class Indians, is anxious to distance himself from Christian Creationism, which he associates with religious and political fanaticism. But his own ‘objections’ to evolution are no more sophisticated than those of fundamentalist Christians or Muslims, and they are equally invalid.
Creationism in all its forms does incalculable damage; no other form of pseudoscience undermines so many scientific discoveries. If you refuse to acknowledge the awesome explanatory power of the theory of evolution, you can never properly understand astronomy, anthropology, biology, geology, palaeontology, physics or zoology. The social, political and cultural implications of such ignorance are profoundly disturbing. A society that does not breed specialists in most or all of these fields cannot expect to evolve into a competitive economy. In rejecting ‘Darwinism’, the developing world thinks it is demonstrating moral superiority over degenerate Western values. In fact, it is doing nothing of the sort. It is rejecting the scientific method itself, and thereby condemning future generations to material and intellectual poverty.