Page 72 - Timelessness and the Reality of Fate

70 TIMELESSNESS AND THE REALITY OF FATE

greater. They declare that this issue is the "biggest threat" for them, and that it
totally "demolishes their cultural fabric".
One of those who expressed in the most outspoken way this anxiety
and panic felt by materialist circles was Renan Pekunlu, an academician as
well as contributor to Bilim ve Utopya (Science and Utopia), a periodical
which has assumed the task of defending materialism. Both in his articles in
Bilim ve Utopya and in the panel discussions he has attended, Pekunlu pre-
sented the book The Evolution Deceit, the first book in which this subject was
brought up, as the number one "threat" to materialism. What disturbed
Pekunlu even more than the chapters that invalidated Darwinism was the
part you are currently reading. To his readers and (only a handful of) audi-
ence, Pekunlu delivered the message: "Do not let yourselves be carried
away by the indoctrination of idealism and keep your faith in materialism,"
and gave Vladimir I. Lenin, the leader of the bloody communist revolution in
Russia, as his reference. Advising everyone to read Lenin's century-old book
titled Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, all Pekunlu did was to repeat the
ignorant counsels of Lenin, stating: "Do not think over this issue, or you will
lose track of materialism and be carried away by religion." In an article he
wrote in the aforementioned periodical, he quoted the following lines from
Lenin:
Once you deny objective reality, given us in sensation, you have already lost
every weapon against fideism, for you have slipped into agnosticism or sub-
jectivism-and that is all that fideism requires. A single claw ensnared, and the
bird is lost. And our Machists have all become ensnared in idealism, that is, in
a diluted, subtle fideism; they became ensnared from the moment they took
"sensation" not as an image of the external world but as a special "element". It
is nobody's sensation, nobody's mind, nobody's spirit, nobody's will. 55
These words explicitly demonstrate that the fact which Lenin alarm-
ingly realised and wanted to banish both from his own mind and the minds
of his "comrades" also disturbs contemporary materialists in a
similar way. However, Pekunlu and other materialists suffer
yet a greater distress; because they are aware that
this fact is now being put forward in a far more
explicit, certain and convincing way than 100
years ago. For the first time in world history,
this subject is being explained in a quite irre-
sistible way.