1- Dear Master Yahya; thank you again for participating in our interview. The first question I would like to ask is about your scientific reasoning for the denial of Darwinism. As you have mentioned several times, Darwinism has been a rampant and prevalent notion all over the word. Would you please give us the most categorical and strong reasons which demonstrate the fallacy of Darwinism?
ADNAN OKTAR: Darwinism faces two great predicaments, the fossil record and its inability to account for how the first living cell appeared. Darwin himself also knew that the fossil record repudiated his theory. He admits in his Origin of Species that the fossil record cannot be explained in terms of evolution:
"Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable trantsitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined? Innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?... Why then is not every geological formation an every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geogoly assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. (Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, pp.172-280)
Darwin asked why no transitional forms were to be found around 150 years ago, and Darwinists today are still seeking an answer to that question. Yet the answer to this question is very easy, not a single transitional form has to date been found because no such form exists. More than 100 million fossils have been discovered, but not a single one to show that living things gradually descended from one another, in other words that they evolved. The entire fossil record proves that living things appeared suddenly, that is, they are created, and remained unchanged for tens (sometime even for hundreds) of millions of years, in other words, that they never underwent evolution. Darwinists carefully tried to keep this fact hidden, and if you notice, there is never any mention of fossils in the famous museums and universities of the world, and fossils are never exhibited. In the majority of the most famous centers in the world, they only display fossil specimens of a few extinct species or dinosaurs, etc. But a 200-year-old spider fossil, a 300-million-year-old fossil fern or a 100-million-year-old fish are never put on display. But by Allah’s leave, we have foiled this Darwinist ruse. We published hundreds of illustrations of fossil specimens in my book titled Atlas of Creation, along with photographs of living specimens. Darwinists then fell into a terrible panic, because these illustrations deal a lethal blow to Darwinism.
Another major impasse facing Darwinists is their inability to account for how the first cell appeared. They say the first cell appeared spontaneously in a collection of muddy water under the effect of storms and lightning. When you ask how such a thing could have happened, they say in a miraculous manner. Then when you ask how this unconscious cell gave rise to human beings, plants and animals, they again gloss over it by saying it happened by chance. They have a false deity by the name of chance and are capable of such irrational actions as that. They believe that flowers, cherries, oranges, tigers, rabbits, cats and, most important of all, human beings who compose symphonies, build cities, study the atom and journey into space all emerge from mud. Even a primary school student would laugh at such a story, yet people who have become professors and academics are able to take and relate them perfectly seriously. This is an important indication that Darwinism has literally cast a spell over people. But Allah has now lifted that spell, and people have begun seeing the truth. Darwinism will soon be consigned to the dusty shelves of history, and people will be amazed how they were ever taken in by it, insha’Allah.
2- A major part of Darwinism hinges on the notion of "natural selection", that is the supremacy and diffusion of favorable heritable traits in a successive reproduction of generations. What are your grounds for denying this?
ADNAN OKTAR: One of Darwinists’ most important tactics is to use complex terminology sprinkled with incomprehensible Latin words, to pass over what they cannot explain away and generally to muddy the waters and attempt to show that what is impossible might actually have happened. Darwinists have to explain how life first appeared. It is pointless for a theory that cannot account for how the first cell came into being to speculate on how living species appeared. In addition, natural selection has no features capable of giving rise to a new species, and that is a clear and technical reality. It is a fact that the strong survive in nature while the weak generally die. Evolutionists try to depict this as evidence for evolution. But the fact the weak fall prey to the strong has nothing to do with evolution. Those entities resistant to the cold survive, while those which are not die. The fleet of foot escape while the slower fall behind and are caught by predators. There is nothing original or amazing in that. It is true that among a herd of antelopes running away from a lion, the fastest and most active ones will escape the lion’s attack, but these antelopes that thus escape do not turn into giraffes or some other life form. Natural selection cannot add any new feature to a living thing’s genetic structure and cannot turn one life form into another. In other words, contrary to what Darwinists claim, natural selection is not an evolutionary force. Indeed, no evidence to the effect that natural selection causes living things to evolve has ever been observed. The British evolutionist and paleontologist Colin Patterson admits this in the words:
"No one has ever produced a species by mechanisms of natural selection. " No one has ever got near it and most of the current argument in neo-Darwinism is about this question."
3- What is your view of mutation? It has been observed that some offspring are genetically paralyzed, blind, deaf, dwarf or afflicted with some certain mental, physical illness when they are born. Do you deny the role of mutation in this field, or do you consider any other factor that contributes to genetic complexity?
ADNAN OKTAR: Mutations are changes that take place in DNA as a result of radiation or chemical effects. Radioactive rays may sometimes impact on the DNA chain and damage one or a few of the steps in it or else cause them to change place. Mutations are terribly harmful to living structures. Mutation leads to impairment rather than development, and no example of beneficial mutation has ever been observed. But according to evolutionists’ expansive imaginations, living things assumed their present-day perfect states as the result of the mutations (in other words accidents) of a single DNA. It is of course impossible to believe in such a logic. If we think of DNA as a book, then mutations are like spelling mistakes arising as the book is being written out. Obviously, spelling mistakes as the book is being written out can never improve it and can never add any new chapters to the book. Damage is the only thing that will resut from errors. For example, if we think of thick history of the world being written out on computer, and the layout is interfered with a number of times, with the person doing the typing being told to press the keys at random with his eyes closed, and if that manuscript is then given to someone else to copy, who also does the same thing, and if this process repeated several times from beginning to end, then is that history book likely to be improved in any way? Or could a chapter such as “The History of Ancient China” that was not previously in the manuscript find its way into it? Of curse not. The more we replicate the inaccurate copying process, the more defective a book we are going to end up with. But according to the theory of evolution, “spelling mistakes do improve a book.” According to evolution, mutations (errors) in DNA combined to produce random beneficial results, such as bestowing perfect organs such as eyes, ears, wings or hands on living things, or characteristics requiring consciousness, such as thinking, learning or analyzing. All the “accounts” the theory of evolution seeks to bring to bear on the origin of life consist of such irrational and illogical claims.
In short, mutation is not a system that improves and perfects living things, as evolutionists claim. The net effect of mutations is harmful. The changes caused by mutations are the kind suffered by people at Hiroshima, Nagasaki or Chernobyl: In other words dead, crippled or deformed entities.
4- Some theoreticians believe that the creation of mankind is a sequence of ape creations, and cite the existence of common inherited traits between humans and primates to prove their notion. What do you think about this idea?
ADNAN OKTAR: As well as all the universe and all living things, human beings also came into existence by Allah commanding them to “Be!” No life form is descended from any other. Human beings were created as human beings and have no common ancestors with apes or any other creatures. Darwin’s thesis that humans and apes share a common ancestor was not supported by any scientific findings either when it was first proposed or subsequently. Approximately 150 years have passed, and all the efforts made to prop up the myth of human evolution have been in vain. The fossils unearthed have confirmed that apes have always existed as apes and human beings as human beings, that apes never turned into human beings, and that human beings and apes do not share a common ancestor.
Faced by the disappointment inflicted on them by the fossil record and their own lack of evidence, all that evolutionists have done is to set skulls that have by no means any validity in sequences and speculate on fossils that have long since been documented as frauds. Even, they have resorted to all kinds of hoaxes, as with Piltdown Man. In describing their supposed tale of human evolution, evolutionists establish, at least in their own eyes, an evolutionary sequence and family tree on the basis of the volumes of the skulls discovered and of protruding eyebrows or forehead characteristics. But the structural differences evolutionists reveal in skulls is no evidence for evolution. Because some of these skulls belong to extinct species of ape, and others to human races that once existed in the past. It is perfectly natural for different human races to have different skull characteristics. Different species of fish have different shaped skulls. For example, a trout skull bears no resemblance to an eel skull. Yet both are fish. In the same way, there may be differences among the skulls of different human races. There will naturally be differences in terms of forehead structure, eyebrow protrusion and skull volume among pygmies, British people, Russians, Chinese, Eskimos, Negroes and Japanese. But these differences do not mean that one race is descended from another or that one race is more primitive or more advanced than another. An aboriginal race will maintain its own characteristics so long as it does not intermix with another race. No matter how much time goes by, these people will never evolve in such a way as to acquire new characteristics. Their skull volumes will not rise and they will have no new anatomical features. For example, the large eyebrow protrusions and backward sloping brow of Homo erectus skulls, which evolutionists have long regarded as primitive, can also be seen in some native peoples living in Malaysia today. If evolutionists’ claims were true, then these native Malaysian people should look like and have the structural features of “human beings who have just stopped being apes and have not yet fully developed.” But that is out of the question. The fact that characteristics of the Homo erectus skull can still be seen today, means both that Homo erectus is not a primitive species and that the evolutionist “human family tree” is a lie. One could provide further examples. But to summarize, the idea that human beings and apes are descended from a common ancestor is unscientific, and also a lie.
5- You have long commented on the emergence of imperialistic and materialistic thought as a result of Darwinism. What are the relations between Darwinism and other Western sociopolitical ways of thinking?
ADNAN OKTAR: If a theory makes a scientific claim and insists on imposing that on the entire world, despite having been disproved with hundreds of pieces of evidence by all branches of science, and if efforts are made to keep it alive in the face of reason and science, then there is clearly nothing at all in any way related to science going on here. I realized right from my high school days that all this bloodshed, these world wars, the ruthless exploitation of people and revolutions could not be spontaneous, but that there had to be something behind them. Because people would not oppress one another so much of their own accord. They will not be good neighbors enjoying friendly relations one day and start slaughtering each other the next. When I researched it, I saw that all these scourges were organized by freemasonry, and that the religion of freemasonry is Darwinism. There is no materialism without Darwinism, and no communism, fascism, savage capitalism or terror without materialism. Those responsible for the great wars in the 19th and 20th centuries, all the slaughter, invasions and genocide then, were all Darwinists. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Lenin, Mao and all the others believed in and espoused Darwinism, and Darwinism always lay at the heart of the blood they shed and the suffering they inflicted. When the false idea that “nature is a place of struggle and conflict” was applied to society and human beings, Hitler’s obsession of the “master race,” Marx’s idea that “the history of mankind is the history of class conflict,” the capitalist idea that “the strong must become even stronger by crushing the weak,” the exploitation of the third world by imperialist countries such as Britain and their subjection to inhuman treatment and the ongoing racist attacks and discrimination against colored people all acquired a kind of legitimacy. This is a fact even expressed by some evolutionists. Despite being an evolutionist, Robert Wright, for instance, author of the book The Moral Animal, summarized the disasters inflicted on mankind by the theory of evolution as follows:
“Evolutionary theory, after all, has a long and largely sordid history of application to human affairs. After being mingled with political philosophy around the turn of the century to form the vague ideology known as "social Darwinism," it played into the hands of racists, fascists, and the most heartless sort of capitalists. But that cause has since disappeared. Darwinism has completely collapsed. People have seen that Darwinism is a deception. And it is impossible for Darwinism ever to be brought back to life again.
6- What are the major differences between Creationism and Evolutionism? In what aspects, in your view, are Evolutionism and Darwinism contrary to Islamic values and morals?
ADNAN OKTAR: Darwinism denies the existence and oneness of Allah and that people are responsible to our Lord, Allah. It is the basis of materialism and movements that are incompatible with religious moral values. That is why there are these constant efforts to keep it alive, for ideological reasons, even though it has been scientifically completely discredited. Darwinist and materialist ideas that espouse the error that the universe and human beings are the work of blind chance, maintain that relations between human beings, which they regard as a supposed species of animal, should be those that apply among animals. This heretical perspective regards selfishness, ruthlessness, fighting, conflict and killing as supposedly quite legitimate. It regards feelings such as compassion, love, affection and respect as obstacles that impede the evolutionary process. Under Darwinist indoctrination, people are raised who have no conception of love and who are cruel, aggressive and self-interested. It is obvious that it is impossible and unacceptable to seek to reconcile such a mindset with Islam.
Allah has revealed many verses about the creation of life and the universe in the Qur’an. But these verses contain no indication that life forms are descended from one another or that there is any evolutionary link between them. Of course, had Allah willed He could have created living things through evolution. But there is no such indication in the Qur’an and no verse to support the idea of the gradual emergence of species as espoused by evolutionists. If there were such a form of creation we should be able to see detailed statements regarding it in the Qur’an. On the contrary, however, it is revealed in the Qur'an that life and the universe came into being in a miraculous manner by Allah commanding them to "Be!":
"The Originator of the heavens and Earth. When He decides on something, He just says to it, ‘Be!’ and it is.” (Surat al-Baqara, 117)
If, as is claimed, half-man half-ape life forms really had existed before the Prophet Adem (as), if mutations and natural selection had been at work in the creation of life, then Allah would have provided very clear and easily understood statements to that effect in the Qur’an. However, the Qur’an contains not one such verse. On the contrary, a great many verses reveal that man was created from nothing, in the finest manner possible. Allah is He Who is unfettered by any flaw or deficiency, He Who stands in need of nothing. For that reason, Allah has no need of any cause, or instrument or intermediary or stages in order to create. The fact that everything in the world is dependent on natural causes and laws must not deceive anyone. Allah, as the Creator, is entirely unfettered by any of these. Some people who fail to properly appreciate Allah’s sublime creative power and the artistry in His creation come up with extraordinary ideas such as “Islamic evolution.” When these people, who maintain that human beings developed through evolution, are asked how the angels and the djinn were created, their answer will be “Allah created them from nothing.” The way the Prophet Musa’s (as) staff turned into a snake with a digestive system when he cast it on the ground cannot be explained in terms of evolution. Neither can the way a piece of clay in the shape of a bird turned into a living bird and flew away when the Prophet ‘Isa (as) breathed on it be explained in terms of evolution. Nor can the resurrection on the Day of Judgment be explained in terms of evolution. The gardens of Paradise and the mansions in Heaven cannot be explained by evolution.
