Clay Burell's Profile

If you're waiting for her to stop explaining where the fundamentalists went wrong and start her case against "Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens," you're going to be disappointed again -- because Armstrong seems them as both as flip sides of the same coin.

Like all religious fundamentalists, the new athesists believe that they alone are in possession of the truth; like Christian fundamentalists they read scripture in an entirely literal manner and seem to never have heard of the long tradition of allegoric or Talmudic interpretation... Harris seems to imagine that biblical inspiration means that the Bible was actually "written by God." Hitchens assumes that faith is entirely dependent on a literal reading of the Bible, and that, for example, the discrepancies in the gospel infancy narratives prove the falseness of Christianity: "Either the gospels are in some sense literal truth, or the whole thing is a fraud and perhaps a moral one at that." Like Protestant fundamentalists, Dawkins has a simplistic view of the moral teaching of the Bible, taking it for granted that its chief purpose is to issue clear rules of conduct and provide us with "role models," which, not surprisingly, he finds lamentably inadequate. He also presumes that since the Bible claims to be inspired by God it must also provide scientific information. Dawkins' only point of disagreement with the Protestant fundamentalists is that he finds the Bible unreliable about science while they do not.

Armstrong is not worried about the claim that God can't be found in science. Which is, in fact, a very old claim.

In fact, the new atheists are not radical enough. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is "nothing" out there...

Her concern is that the Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins camp concern themselves only with tackling a theology that is itself "decidedly unorthodox" and limited -- they want to knock down a sickly child and then proclaim they've won the heavyweight title.

“There is a group of followers who are commissioned to write the books. For every book, they will take a few key sources written by Christian creationist authors, mostly from the US. They plagiarise the chapters and paragraphs that agree with their creationist approach. Then they add the photos, a few ayat from the Koran, and sometimes a bit of a commentary. None of the ideas belong to Oktar.”

In 2006, Oktar created an international stir when he sent a book of high-quality fossil images to biology teachers worldwide. Published on almost 800 pages of glossy stock, the "Atlas of Creation" sets out to show that creatures today are essentially the same as those that lived, and became fossilized, eons ago -- an argument also found in American creationism. The source of funding for the book, which emphasizes North American fossil finds, remains murky.

Speaking in his home and television studio overlooking the Bosporus, Oktar asserted responsibility for "defeating" Darwinism in Turkey and said that Americans had helped him do it. But as he sees it, the student has become the teacher. He has created a far-reaching anti-evolution empire, he said, while American creationists and advocates of intelligent design still struggle to be heard.

The 53-year-old Oktar, dressed entirely in white, said he is not a scientist but an author "following the path of Allah." He said that by aggressively attacking evolution, he has drawn persecution in the form of lawsuits, legal cases and police torture. He is awaiting a ruling on an appeal of his conviction last year on charges that his group -- which some in Turkey liken to a cult -- had become a criminal, moneymaking enterprise.

Being an advocate for evolution in Turkey has its costs, too. Aykut Kence, who earned his doctorate in evolutionary biology in the United States and now teaches at an Ankara university, has fought back-and-forth lawsuits with Oktar for years. He began to take the creationists seriously when they circulated leaflets with pictures of him and Mao Zedong, publicly equating Kence's teaching of evolution to communism. His defense of evolution, he said, has cost him government funding.