The Muslim challenge to evolution

The NY Times had a story yesterday about the creationist textbook sent around the world. The book, "Atlas of Creation," was not the product of the Discovery Institute or Answers in Genesis, but that of a Turkish Muslim, Harun Yahya.

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.”

"In fact," the Times reports, "there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth" -- which is something you've read here before. Most scientists, even God-fearing ones like Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project, believe evolution exists alongside the Creator.