Muslim creationism

I’m going to be reading “The Creation of the Universe” by Adnan Oktar (under the pen name of Harun Yahya). The Introduction is called “The Scientific Collapse of Materialism”.

Oktar begins with the question of how the universe came to be, and immediately starts quoting verses in the Quran that describe Allah creating the universe. He then states that this truth from the Quran is validated by Galileo, Kepler & Newton. I hope he’s planning to back that up later in the book.

Just one note before I start. This book is basically an Islamic apologetic – its aim is to scientifically prove the validity of the Quran. Obviously therefore, any quotes from the Quran cannot be used as evidence. The verses are what we are trying to establish the truth of, and therefore cannot be use as evidence to attest to that truth.

He starts by talking about philosophical materialism. This is the idea that the only thing that exists is matter (and it’s less concentrated form, energy) and that all phenomena in the world are the result of material (physical) interactions. The alternative views are idealism (reality can only be known or perceived through ideas – there is no reality that is independent of the mind) and dualism (there is matter and there is also spirits or souls and other things that are not material and yet can affect matter).

However, Oktar goes a little bit further and says that the two fundamental assertions of materialism are (1) the idea that the universe is infinite and therefore has no beginning or end and that (2) the universe was not created. Probably this philosophical belief has a name, but it isn’t materialism.

Let’s tackle part 1 first. He mentions the big bang, which is the basis of his claim that materialism has been refuted. His argument is that because the big bang implies that the universe had a beginning, the claim that the universe is infinite is false and therefore materialism is false. The first problem I see is that materialism does not imply an infinite universe. There’s nothing in anything I’ve ever read about materialism that necessitates an infinite universe. So as far as I’m concerned, the fact that the universe has not existed for an infinite amount of time is not a death knell for materialism.

Regarding creation, he invokes the anthropic principle and then simply quotes the Quran as evidence that the universe was created, and thus says that the second part of materialism is refuted. He does posit the standard Christian creationist false dichotomy: either the universe as we see it today was created by Allah or it was purely the result of chance. Of course, I believe neither of those things: I believe that it is purely the result of physical processes, many of which we now understand. In effect, I believe in materialism.

And since Oktar defined materialism wrongly in the first place, he has not yet managed to disprove it. Let’s hope he does better in the first chapter.