Islamic Creationist Stirs Up Controversy

This morning's Wall Street Journal cover story, "An Islamic Creationist Stirs a New Kind of Darwinian Struggle" caught my attention. The subsequent article was a provocative one.

This piece tells the story of Adnam Oktar.

As scientists around the world celebrate the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's seminal work on evolution, Adnan Oktar, a college dropout turned theorist of Islamic creationism, is working on the fifth volume of a 14-part masterwork that he says will bury Darwinism once and for all...

"Darwin and his theory are dead," says Mr. Oktar, founder and honorary president of the Science Research Foundation, an Istanbul outfit dedicated to debunking the Victorian-era English naturalist. Darwin, says his 52-year-old Turkish scourge, is "Satan's biggest trick on humanity."

I suppose it's not a big surprise that Oktar's work and influence has pushed the buttons of the outspoken atheist & Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins, who has worked with child-like fervor to ban websites that publish the work of Oktar, etc., etc. etc. The truth about their interpersonal dynamics is one in which you have to read between the lines.

I'm used to the Christian Creationist - Atheist Darwinist battle that is covered by the media each time a bigwig from either camp comes out with a new book or late night TV spew. For me, (and now I point to my own ignorance) my fascination with the dialogue was slightly renewed by the article. A light bulb went on as I realized the magnitude of this interfaith conversation - a conversation that is no less heated when you bring in other faith traditions.

While I am not, necessarily, a six-day creationist, I will admit (for better or for worse) to some strange satisfaction in knowing there are those of other faiths ganging up Darwinians like Dawkins, chiding the other camp to present more proof that this world isn't millions of years old and that divine, creative design was the generator of it all. I could let the whole how-the-world-began discussion go if it wasn't for all the other inherent convictions that spill forth from this one conversation.

What is your reaction to the article?