Adnan Oktar

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Adnan Oktar : biography

1956 –

Taner Edis has said "there is nothing new in the Yahya material: scientifically negligible arguments and outright distortions often copied from Christian anti-evolution literature, presented with a conservative Muslim emphasis" concluding it "has no scholarly standing whatsoever"., Taner Edis, Islamic Creationism: A Short History, History of Science Society, Newsletter, vol 37, No. 1, 2008 According to Richard Dawkins, Oktar "doesn’t know anything about zoology, doesn’t know anything about biology. He knows nothing about what he is attempting to refute".

In France, scientists spoke out against the book, and American scientists are unimpressed.

The Atlas of Creation

Oktar published volume 1 of his Yaratılış Atlası (The Atlas of Creation), with Global Publishing, Istanbul, Turkey in October 2006. Volumes 2 and 3 followed in 2007. A dedicated website (yaratilisatlasi.com, English atlasofcreation.com) registered to Global Yayıncılık (Global Publishing), Istanbul, went online also in 2007.

At 11 x 17 inches and 12 pounds, with a bright red cover and almost 800 glossy pages, most of them lavishly illustrated, “Atlas of Creation” is according to the New York Times "probably the largest and most beautiful creationist challenge yet to Darwin’s theory, which Mr. Yahya calls a feeble and perverted ideology contradicted by the Koran". Tens of thousands of copies of the book have been delivered, on an unsolicited basis, to schools, prominent researchers and research institutes throughout Europe and the United States.

Biologist Kevin Padian from the University of California, Berkeley, said people who had received copies were “just astounded at its size and production values and equally astonished at what a load of crap it is." adding that "[Oktar] does not really have any sense of what we know about how things change through time.”

Gerdien de Jong, one of five biologists at Utrecht University who received a copy of the book, has described its reasoning as "absurdly ridiculous".

Biologist PZ Myers wrote: "The general pattern of the book is repetitious and predictable: the book shows a picture of a fossil and a photo of a living animal, and declares that they haven’t changed a bit, therefore evolution is false. Over and over. It gets old fast, and it’s usually wrong (they have changed!) and the photography, while lovely, is entirely stolen."

The Committee on Culture, Science and Education of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe wrote in a report that "None of the arguments in this work are based on any scientific evidence, and the book appears more like a primitive theological treatise than the scientific refutation of the theory of evolution."

Conspiracy theories

Oktar propagates a number of conspiracy theories, beginning with his 1986 Yahudilik ve Masonluk (Judaism and Freemasonry). The book suggests that the principal mission of Jews and Freemasons in Turkey was to erode the spiritual, religious, and moral values of the Turkish people and, thus, make them like animals, as stated in what Oktar refers to as their use of "Distorted Torah.", Harun Yaha Oktar asserts that "the materialist standpoint, evolution theory, anti-religious and immoral lifestyles were indoctrinated to the society as a whole" by Jews and Freemasons.

His theory of a global conspiracy of Freemasonry is expounded in his book Global Masonluk (English Global Freemasonry) and on his websites Masonluk and Global Freemasonry. – A website based on the works of Harun Yahya According to Oktar, Freemasonry is "the main architect of the world system based on materialist philosophy, but which keeps that true identity concealed." Oktar called the theory of evolution a Masonic conspiracy initiated by the Rosicrucians.

Oktar’s recent publications declare Darwinism and Materialism to be conspiracies responsible for anti-semitism and terrorism. In recent publications and interviews (since 2004), Oktar qualifies his condemnations of Zionism and Freemasonry by adding the word atheist before them, as in atheist Zionists and atheist Freemasons.