For this piece I had two roads before me: either postpone it until I had tidied up the text and my thoughts, or publish it much as it is — dishevelled, like a somewhat long tweet.
I know that on the first road it would end up among the dozens of drafts I never publish, and I might not look at it again for months. So let me try this other road for once. That is why I am also loosening the style. I do not have much time; if it can be of use like this, perhaps I will have a chance to share more often.
✱A note on style and language
The looseness of this text is deliberate. The author says so outright: he chose to publish it raw rather than let it sit polished and unpublished. That choice was left untouched here — sentences were not flattened, the asides and jokes were kept. The Turkish is the author's own pen; the English is a translation. And a reminder: the title states the claim he refutes throughout, not the one he holds.
The Philosophical Foundations and Biases of Science
Since the Enlightenment, the world of positive science has been a front against the dogmatic influence of the church. On that front it took shelter in a handful of philosophical commitments.
The three commitments taken as shelter
The philosophical ground of post-Enlightenment positive science
Rationalism
Every observable phenomenon is intelligible.
Naturalism
Events in nature flow spontaneously by fixed laws, without intervention from a higher power.
Empiricism and positivism
True knowledge is obtained through observation.
For this reason science produced methods and instruments that serve to understand not the essence of things and events but their modality. And of course a great many people who do not quite know or grasp this distinction may imagine they know what a thing — the electron, say — actually is.
✱The distinction itself — essence / modality
Essence (mahiyet): what a thing is — its core, its reality. Modality (keyfiyet): how it is — its relations and properties. The spine of this essay rests on that distinction: what science measures is modality. The question of essence is a metaphysical one; it is developed and narrated through a priori ontology. So science describing exhaustively how something behaves does not amount to saying what it is.
In that case you end up, at the deepest level, having to accept either the metaphysics of physicalism (we may also call it materialism) or that of idealism. This matters, though it is not directly our subject. For now let us put it very briefly and simply:
Two metaphysics, two starting points
The physicalist / materialist view
Matter is fundamental; at bottom, there is matter.
Meaning, concepts, experiences, feelings — secondary entities arising from configurations of matter
Their subsistence depends upon matter
Consciousness, will, experience: arise in some unknown way, from some unknown configuration of the brain's signals
→
The exact opposite: the one thing we know most fundamentally is awareness — consciousness, feeling, experience.
We perceive and make sense of matter through the electrical-signal representation the senses produce in the brain
What truly is, is meaning; matter is the garment of that meaning
Without meaning there is no matter — its existence depends on meaning
Indeed the reason behaviours such as quantum entanglement strike us as strange is that, until the observation is made, the thing in question has not yet been determined in the world of meaning and put on the garment of matter.
Anyway, we have dived somewhat needlessly deep. Let us come back up to the surface. Science tries to model, understand and predict the behaviour of nature.
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To arrive at a holistic understanding, science necessarily stands in need of a metaphysics.
Somebody Wants to Spread Godlessness, So I Shall Say the Exact Opposite!
To become reactive and take up a position against the theory of evolution in order to defend religion is a sign of having no position at all, and of shallowness. This is what is meant by negative movement.
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Those who choose their enemy as the source of their own voice and momentum are dependent on that enemy. Their concern is not truth but self-vindication.
Those who fall into the same handicap
Setting out one's cause through the rhetoric of an enemy — in practice, if not in theory
Political Islam
One of the three examples the author gives
The nationalist movement
The same pattern: identity is drawn from what it opposes
Turkish socialist movements
The author calls this a handicap, not an accusation
Even the followers of the man who said “our way is positive action” are out looking for enemies. Yet if your concern is truth, then who says what, for what reason, and to what end does not affect your position. Sometimes the most errant, most mistaken person or group may confirm what you are saying, and appear for a while to be walking the same road. That should not shake where you stand. One must not get snagged on the ad hominem fallacy of “so-and-so, who is wrong, says this too — therefore it is wrong.”
So Why Do They Not Do the Same to the Big Bang?
And suppose we grant it: that atheist, materialist, irreligious scientists back the theory of evolution merely to support their own views, forcing everything to fit it. Why then do they not do the same — on a far larger scale — to the Big Bang?
The alleged posture versus the actual one
The claim: they force evolution to fit
According to the rejectionists, the scientific community bends the evidence to rescue materialism.
The aim is presented as striking a blow against religion
→Of course people will always find an exit for their own metaphysical commitments — the issue is not denial of evidence but its interpretation.
In fact: the Big Bang is not rejected
That same community does not reject the Big Bang — under far greater metaphysical pressure — but produces models instead.
Alternative models are offered: infinitely many universes, continually born universes
For fine-tunings such as the fine structure constant, they escape into other universes
But nobody ignores the evidence, and nobody presents evidence that does not exist
✱The author's own caveat
“When I say nobody, understand me — I mean the mainstream; there are of course always exceptions.” — The author himself qualifies this generalisation within the text.
“Wasn't There That Piltdown Fossil? They're a Cabal of Heretics…”
It is not as though no fake data or evidence is ever produced in the scientific community — of course such cases exist. But those who brought them to light were, again, other scientists working in the same community, in the same field.
✱The author's aside
“We don't say ‘man of science’ — you know, it comes out sexist; though we could wriggle out of it by noting that in Phoenician, the ancestor of the Semitic languages, ‘adam’ means human — but there's no need to strain.” In keeping with the decision to preserve the text's loose style, this aside was not removed.
As in many other scientific matters, in the matter of evolution too there were people who forged fossils, trying to make a name for themselves. They did not do it to strike a blow against religion. They did it to carve their names into history, to become great and important scientists. Yet the ones who exposed them were, once again, evolutionary scientists.
The scientific community is highly critical, highly severe. As with any other theory, the scientific world sees the gaps in evolution, works on them, and modifies the theory with what it finds. But this is a process.
How a serious claim makes its way in science
TRIGGER
A serious claim is put forward
Any claim — evolution included — enters through this door.
STATE
Fierce debate and refutations
Evidence traded both ways; the community tests the claim harshly.
STATE
10–15 years
Do the findings of other scientists support the claim?
OUTCOME
Gradual acceptance
Acceptance is not a vote but the result of accumulated support.
Well, since at the start we said “I shall publish it dishevelled,” a closing that is dishevelled but sincere suits the end:
They do not fight in the same ring
Evolution — the field of science
No rival has yet emerged; the strongest explanatory framework we have.
Correcting its errors and crookednesses is science's own debt of honour
→The moment this distinction is drawn, the “either science or religion” dilemma dissolves of itself.
Creation — the field of metaphysics
It plays not on science's field but on the field of metaphysics.
The rules of the contest differ — they do not fight in the same ring
As for the line “they invented evolution to destroy religion!” — it would not even make a 6-out-of-10 conspiracy series on Netflix. Skip it with an easy conscience.
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In sum: you do not lose your faith by questioning the essence of the electron, nor the truth by examining the age of fossils. The one who asks good questions does not lose; the one who fears the question loses.
You who are reading these lines — yes, you — come even with your absurd questions: “So why aren't today's monkeys turning into humans?” or “So why isn't today's mud turning into humans?” Science adores the absurd.
✱About the author · the trilogy
This text is Felsufi's own view, taken from the original piece on Medium; the site has applied no editorial refereeing. It is the second link in the site's evolution trilogy: Evolution, Again? (2024-11-12) → Evolution Is a Project to Spread Godlessness! (2025-05-14) → Evolution, Belief and the Pictures in Our Minds (2025-10-25). The physicalism–idealism discussion it touches on is developed at length in Terminology 3: The Fragility and Limits of Physicalism on this site.