Tuesday, July 17, 2007

"Too Beautiful for the Trash Bin but Too Erroneous for Their Shelves"

This is an amusing article about a form of Creationist thought that will put many leftists in a quandry. Sure, they're supposed to regard it as ignorant, but it comes from their favorite religion, so they are supposed to make excuses for its "authenticity". From the July 17, 2007 New York Times:

Now another voice is entering the debate, in dramatic fashion.

It is the voice of Adnan Oktar of Turkey, who, under the name Harun Yahya, has produced numerous books, videos and DVDs on science and faith, in particular what he calls the “deceit” inherent in the theory of evolution. One of his books, “Atlas of Creation,” is turning up, unsolicited, in mailboxes of scientists around the country and members of Congress, and at science museums in places like Queens and Bemidji, Minn.

At 11 x 17 inches and 12 pounds, with a bright red cover and almost 800 glossy pages, most of them lavishly illustrated, “Atlas of Creation” is probably the largest and most beautiful creationist challenge yet to Darwin’s theory, which Mr. Yahya calls a feeble and perverted ideology contradicted by the Koran.

In bowing to Scripture, Mr. Yahya resembles some fundamentalist creationists in the United States. But he is not among those who assert that Earth is only a few thousand years old. The principal argument of “Atlas of Creation,” advanced in page after page of stunning photographs of fossil plants, insects and animals, is that creatures living today are just like creatures that lived in the fossil past. Ergo, Mr. Yahya writes, evolution must be impossible, illusory, a lie, a deception or “a theory in crisis.”

So what will happen? I rather suspect that the ACLU will suddenly make an about face, and decide that Islamic Creationism is okay in schools because Islam is a minority point of view.

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