One of the more curious episodes in recent cultural history is the adoption, word for word, by Islamists particularly in Turkey of the American Christian fundamentalist antievolution schtick. Nobody knows more about this than Taner Edis, whose book An Illusion of Harmony: Science And Religion in Islam outlines how this came about and the relation between science and Islam (overall: not good).
Here's a nice short article by Edis, from the History of Science newsletter.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
The headline for this week's current reading on the Island is perhaps unfair. It's become trite to point out that algebra and algorithm, to name just two mathematical terms, are derived from Muslim scholars. But as Taner Edis, the author of the book "An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in…
The Reports of the National Center for Science Education has just posted a new review of my book Among the Creationists. The reviewer is Taner Edis, professor of physics at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri. Since Edis's own books on science and religion, The Ghost in the Machine…
Salon has posted this interview with physicist Taner Edis. You might recognize Edis as the coeditor (with Matt Young) of the magisterial book Why Intelligent Design Fails.
The subject of the present interview is his new book, An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam. Edis has a lot…
A few months ago, my boss (a professor of structural biology at the University of Oxford) received a strange package in the mail, unsolicited. It contained a rather large and colorful book that was quite stunning in appearance. Inside, though, spread across hundreds of color-illustrated pages,…
Well, at least they're honest about why they don't like evolution. At least one can begin the discussion where it needs to start, with the religious beliefs, instead of all the ID hokum.
I thought Harun Yahya was the pseudonym for a real person, Adnan Oktar, rather than a movement, which is how Edis describes it/him.
He is certainly well-known in Indonesia, where huge numbers of Harun Yahya books on science have been translated into Indonesian and are prominently displayed in the bookshops. Most look like - I haven't read them - fairly straight accounts of various aspects of science aimed at schools.
It is where evolution arises that he goes totally ape. I have a book (with a CD!) entitled in Indonesian "The Human Disaster of Darwinism", with photos of such well-known "scientists" as Darwin, Hitler, Mao and Stalin on the cover. A conference on his "works " was held in Jakarta a year or two ago.
It is sad that Indonesian children (and adults) are misled in this manner, but Indonesian debate on science is generally very low level. For example, they seemed not to want to know about the Flores Hobbit, despite it being found in their own country, and despite (or because of) the obvious implications for human evolution.
Those wacky Muslims!!!
Oktar may be the figurehead, but he clearly doesn't pump out the thousands of pages of material - it's a group effort and often plagiarised from American creationists (and the glossy photographs are also stolen in many cases from real scientific work).
He's also a Holocaust denier and Masonic-conspiracist.