Harun Yahya's book "The Atlas of Creation" is sent to schools all over the world

format_quote Originally Posted by Ali_Cena

What do you mean "brave", you really do know nothing about islam, becuase no where in the Quran-e-Shariffe does it say that the earth is 6000 years old.

so that does show that you have no understanding of islam.

Now, Einstein, just show me where I said that the Qur'an does say the Earth is 6000 years old?

I was merely stating, that, doorster, can believe WHATEVER HE WANTS, that I am not forcing him to accept my opinions - even if its something crazy like the Earth is 6000 years old.

format_quote Originally Posted by SixTen

Now, Einstein, just show me where I said that the Qur'an does say the Earth is 6000 years old?

I was merely stating, that, doorster, can believe WHATEVER HE WANTS, that I am not forcing him to accept my opinions - even if its something crazy like the Earth is 6000 years old.

there was you accusing others of arrogance yet you are full of it, it looks as our complaints of personal abuse/insults from you fall on deaf ears, it looks as if they are repping you instead of giving you infractions

weird place!

format_quote Originally Posted by doorster

there was you accusing others of arrogance yet you are full of it, it looks as our complaints of personal abuse/insults from you fall on deaf ears, it looks as if they are repping you instead of giving you infractions

weird place!

How was my comment arrogant? This guy comes, doesn't comprehend my post, and then continues to insult by stating I know nothing about Islam and states somthing that is competly made up (that I am implying 6000 years exists in Qur'an).

Doorster, was you seriously expecting me, to reply, cheerfully, with flowers and chocolates to add to the guy?

It would make for an interesting RE Lesson....

I hear that the Church Of The Flying Sphagetti Monster are also about to send it's books to schools too. Great, let's tech the controversy

Here is an article I read on the BBC website. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I hope you will too..

Discrepancies in the Theory of Evolution

Many people believe that science has proven that life and all it encompasses evolved by infinitesimal gradiations, a theory we call evolution. According to creationist theory, this is simply not true. The theory of evolution has many discrepancies and often conflicts with reality. Let us take a walk down popular science's timeline of the universe, and examine it objectively and scientifically.
Prebiological Evolution
First let us look at the theory of evolution itself. Before life can evolve from one thing to another it must be created in its simplest form. All life undergoes something called protein 'transcription' and 'translation'.
It starts with DNA. DNA is described as a twisted ladder. Now try making a ladder with as many rungs as the Encyclopaedia Britannica has letters! Furthermore, these letters - or 'bases' - must be in a set order according to what organism they are in. In short, DNA is like a book. A book cannot be made by throwing random letters of the alphabet together. The letters must be carefully selected by an intelligent source - the author. This means DNA needs a writer, and we can certainly suppose that the being who created the universe also 'writes' DNA.
DNA must interact with mRNA1 to continue the transcription and translation. mRNA is created base by base copying the opposite of DNA. Then this mRNA goes through a ribosome (or rRNA2) and connects with tRNA3. tRNA is a smaller version of mRNA that picks up complex organic compounds called amino acids. When tRNA and mRNA meet they form a long chain of amino acids called a protein. You can see now how hard it is for these compounds to simply come together. The odds against these five compounds being randomly formed in a pool of muck just after the planet has cooled and then to have suddenly begun this cycle are astronomical, if not impossible, yet life according to evolution requires that this happen. In fact, life requires that this happen.
In 1953, a scientist named Stanley Miller mixed several chemicals is a glass tube, zapped them with electricity, and subsequently created the previously-mentioned amino acids. This, he said, was probably what happened in that pool of muck billions of years ago to create life. Newspapers cited a breakthrough and subsequent experiments popped up, some using heat instead of electricity, others ultraviolet rays to mimic the sun.
But organisms only use a specific kind of amino acids known as 'left handed'. Miller's amino acids were of both kinds. There is no natural process that creates only left-handed, life-supporting amino acids.
Five years later, a chemist named Sidney Fox boiled already existing amino acids in water, and some of them formed protein-like chains of amino acids. Again, the scientific community cited a breakthrough. But lifeforms require that proteins are linked by peptide bonds. Fox's protein-like structures had all sorts of different kinds of bonds, rendering them useless to a living organism. Also, a true protein has its amino acids linked in a particular order. Fox's protein-like structures were the equivalent of throwing Scrabble letters on the floor and calling it a sentence.
In both of these experiments, the products were immediately put in tubes in a dark place where they would be incapable of breaking down again. Why? Because as soon as these compounds are created they will fall apart unless their environment changes to a more suitable form. In short, the environment necessary for amino acids to be created is not the same as the environment that will keep them alive. This is because heat, electricity and ultraviolet rays will destroy amino acids. If one wants to create amino acids, one must remove the very things that created them after they are created! Fox and Miller have merely proved that even the tiniest organic molecules can only be created by an intelligent force.
Fossils
In 1859, Charles Darwin published the first widely accepted theory of evolution in the tome The Origin of the Species, and the outcry was almost immediate. Contrary to popular belief, though, this disgruntlement came mostly from geologists, not clergymen. The fossil record back then (and still today) was nearly totally void of transitional species. If species are continually mutating, never constant, why do we continually find several of the same, certain prehistoric creatures, but never any that appear to be in transition? Why do paleontologists find lots of dinosaurs but never where dinosaurs come from, nor what they turned into?
In Darwin's own words, 'Why, if species have descended by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of species being, as we see them, well defined?' It is an excellent question, which he answers himself, 'I can give no satisfactory answer.'
So, resuming our trip through history, let us examine the most abundantly fossilised life forms: vertebrates. These are animals with backbones, including fish, reptiles, mammals, birds and so on.
Fish to Amphibians
The evolutionary thesis states that certain fish species evolved the ability to crawl out of the water and then evolved the other amphibious characteristics. There is no specific fossil fish species yet identified as an amphibian ancestor, but an extinct order known as the rhipsodians are dubbed by Darwinists as the 'ancestral group'. Their skeletal features have certain characteristics that resemble early amphibians, but according to the textbook Vertebrate History by Barbara Stahl, 'none of the known fishes is thought to be directly ancestral to the earliest land vertebrates. Most of them lived after the first amphibians appeared, and those that came before show no evidence of developing the stout limbs and ribs that characterise the primitive tetrapods.' There are other inconsistencies, such as the major differences in the reproductive systems of fish and amphibians.
In 1938, a coelacanth, a fish thought to have been extinct for 70 million years, was caught in the Indian ocean. Scientists thought that as it was a close relative of the rhipsodians it would offer new information about the soft body parts of intermediate ancestors of amphibians and fish. But, in the dissection, its internal organs showed no sign of being pre-adapted to land, nor did it give any indication of how a fish becomes an amphibian. This suggests an examination of the soft body parts of rhipsodians would be equally disappointing to the theory of evolution.
Amphibians to Reptiles
This transition is currently the least explicable. To date there is no satisfactory candidate to document it. There are fossil amphibians called seymouria that have certain reptile characteristics in their skeletal structure, but recently they have been re-labelled true amphibians. They also appear far too late in the fossil record anyway.
The most important differences between reptiles and amphibians, however, involve the soft body parts. And these, of course, cannot be fossilised. The main difficulty for Darwinists attempting to explain this transition is the vast differences in the reproductive system of these two kingdoms. Amphibian eggs are laid underwater and the hatched larvae undergo a complex metamorphosis before they become adults, whereas reptiles lay hard, shell-covered eggs on land and the young are perfect replicas of the adults. No Darwinian explanation yet exists as to how amphibians developed these reptilian reproductive processes.
Reptiles to Mammals
There are plenty of possible transitional species for this mutation, and at first a reptile to mammal transition seems quite plausible. It has even been called the 'crown jewel' of the fossil record. There is a large reptilian order called therapsida, of which some fossils have features intermediate between mammal and reptile. A fossil is considered reptilian if it has more than one bone in its jaw and if one particular jawbone, the articulator bone, connects to the skull's quadrate bone. Mammal fossils have one jawbone, the dentary bone, which connects to the squamosal bone in the skull. Assuming this criterion, some therapsids have slight mammalian characteristics, and a few could reasonably be classified as either reptiles or mammals.
Douglas Futuyuma, evolutionary biologist, writes, 'The gradual transition from therapsids to mammals is so abundantly documented by scores of species in every stage of transition that it is impossible to tell which therapsid species were actual ancestors of modern mammals.' But Darwinian transformation requires a single line of descent, so large numbers of eligible candidates prove nothing. Furthermore, the therapsids do not come in the chronological order required of them by Darwinism. What this means is, therapsid fossils do not go from most reptilian jawbone to most mammalian jawbone in chronological order. As famous Darwin critic Philip Johnson puts it, 'An artificial line of descent [between reptiles and mammals] can be constructed, but only by arbitrarily mixing species of different subgroups, and by arranging them out of chronological order. If [the evolutionary] hypothesis is that mammals evolved from therapsids only once... then most of the therapsids with mammal-like characteristics were not part of a macroevolutionary transition. If most were not, perhaps all were not.'
Besides, the only things therapsids have in common with mammals are the ear and jaw bones. One realises there is a great deal more explaining to do when one observes the vast differences in reptilian and mammalian reproductive systems and other soft body parts. If you go further, things get even trickier, especially trying to explain the mutations behind the diversity of mammals, a group that includes such varieties as monkeys, horses, platypuses, bats, whales, squirrels, polar bears, white tailed deer, etc. Again Philip Johnson is critical saying, 'If mammals are a monophyletic4 group, then the Darwinist model requires that every one of the groups have descended from a single, unidentified small land mammal. Huge numbers of intermediate species in the direct line of transition would have had to exist, but the fossil record fails to record them.'
Reptiles to Birds
Archaeopteryx is an approximately 145 million-year-old bird with skeletal features similar to a small dinosaur called compsognathus. It is birdlike in that it has wings, feathers and a wishbone, but it has a mouthful of teeth and claws on its wings. The question here is whether archaeopteyx is a direct link between reptiles and birds, or just a peculiar misfit such as the modern platypus. Until recently, it was regarded as a misfit because the next oldest birds were aquatic divers, unlikely descendants of archaeopteyx. That changed when two fossil birds with certain reptilian features, dated approximately 10 and 20 million years after archaeopteryx, were found - one in China, one in Spain. There is, however, little evidence that they are related to archaeopteryx. Now, the autheniticity of archaeopteryx has been called into question. Many scientists in good standing believe it was a hoax.
Whatever is concluded about archaeopteryx, questions still arise as to how feathered wings, the distinct avian lung, and other body parts evolved, not to mention the ability to fly. Similar to mammals, birds are a very diversified kingdom containing such species as the emu, the sparrow and the penguin, and it is difficult to explain how they evolved from a single ancestor through viable intermediate stages.
Apes to Humans
Anthropology, the study of human origins, sometimes appears to have more evidence backing it because of its nomenclature. Nebraska man and Piltdown Man were discovered to be hoaxes, Neanderthals are considered as a subspecies, not an ancestor, and Cro-Magnon man is simply modern man. That leaves us with four fossil species, Australopithecus arensis, A. africanus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus.
The first two, known as the australopithecines, are apes no more technologically or cerebrally developed than modern gorillas or chimpanzees, but supposedly walked upright. However, one of Britain's most prestigious primate experts, Solly Zuckerman, recently performed biometric testing on them and concluded that 'the anatomical basis for the claim that [they] walked and ran upright like man is so much more flimsy than the evidence which points to the conclusions that their gait was some variant of what one sees in subhuman primates that it remains unacceptable.' Zuckerman sees the evolution of man from apes as self evident, but tends to see much of the fossil evidence as bunk. He compared it to parapsychology and claimed the amount of radical speculation 'is so astonishing that it is legitimate to ask whether much science is yet to be found in this field at all.' Other experts in good standing claim that the australopithecines were actually distinct species.
Homo habilis or 'handy man' is an ape that was given status as a human ancestor because it was found near primitive tools that it was presumed to have used. But many prestigious anthropologists now deny that he ever used tools, or even that he ever existed.
The popular current hypothesis known as the 'mitochondrial Eve' theory states that humans came from Africa less that 200,000 years ago, thus disqualifying the current Homo erectus fossils, which are older than 200,000 years. However, H. erectus is still listed as a human ancestor.
Why is there so much confusion in this field? Well, emotions often run amok in studies of one's own ancestry. Robert Lewin, in his book Human Evolution, reports numerous examples of subjectivity. He states, 'There is something inexpressibly moving about cradling in one's hands a cranium drawn from one's own ancestry.' What a way to lower objectivity!
Most Creationists do not deny the possibility that these four species might have existed, and therefore the possible transitional steps between apes and humans, but not the smooth sequence of developments proclaimed by Darwinists.

Contd...

And this 2nd part especially relates to the post about wings of a bird earlier...

Irreducible Complexity
Even in the present, many organisms and parts of organisms do not appear to have evolved from lesser things. This is because they are 'irreducibly compex' lifeforms. Irreducible complexity is a concept that biochemistry professor Michael Behe developed in his book, Darwin's Black Box. If something is made of interacting parts that all work together, then it is referred to as irreducibly complex. Behe uses a mousetrap as his example. A mousetrap cannot be assembled through gradual improvement. You cannot start with a wooden base, catching a few mice, then add a hammer, and catch more, then add a spring, improving it further. To even begin catching mice one must assemble all the components completely with design and intent. Furthermore, if one of these parts changes or evolves independently, the entire thing will stop working. The mousetrap, for instance, will become useless if even one part malfunctions.
Likewise, many biological structures are irreducibly complex. Bats are a well known example. They are said to have evolved from a small rodent whose front toes became wings. This presents a multitude of problems. As the front toes grow skin between them, the creature has limbs that are too long to run, or even walk well, yet too short to help it fly. There is no plausible way that a bat wing can evolve from a rodent's front toes. The fossil record supports this, because the first time bats are seen in the fossil record, they have completely developed wings and are virtually identical to modern bats.
Now consider the eye. Suppose that before animals had sight, one species decided it would be advantageous to be able to decrypt light rays. So, what do they evolve first? The retina? The iris? The eye is made of many tiny parts, each totally useless without the others. The probability that a genetic mutation that would create each of these at the same time in the same organism is zero. If, however one organism evolved just a retina, then the logic of Darwin suggests that the only solution is to rid oneself of useless traits replacing them with beneficial ones, so the idea of the eye evolving one segment at a time is bogus also.
Richard Dawkins gives the explanation that some one-celled protozoa have a light sensitive spot with a pigment screen behind it, and some multi-celled organisms have the same thing with cup-shaped cells. Then there is the nautilus which, has a pinhole eye with no lens, and the squid eye, which incorporates the lens.
But these types of eye involve different types of structures rather than a series of similar structures becoming improved, and are thus not thought to have evolved from each other. Besides, even the first step, a light-sensitive spot, is considered irreducibly complex. This apparatus can only detect some shadows, but it requires a multitude of inter-related, complex chemical reactions to work. This excerpt from a book describes it: 'A photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which changes to trans-retinal, which forces a change in the shape of a protein called rhodopsin, which sticks to another protein called transductin, which binds with another molecule...' As for those cup-shaped cells, there are dozens of proteins controlling cell structure and shape. All these would have to be spontaneously created for flat sensory cells to become cup-shaped. Even if the eye did evolve, so many different kind of species have eyes, that according to evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, the eye would have had to evolve over 40 times to achieve its current popularity, an incredibly implausible idea.
A bird is another perfect example. A bird's entire body is built for flight. If even the slightest major mutation occurs, a bird becomes incapable of flight. If some prehistoric reptile felt the urge to fly, evolving something even as complex as wings would do no good. In fact, it would be a disadvantage to lug those wings around.
The only plausible explanation for irreducibly complex biological tissue is an intelligent creator.
So Why is the Theory of Evolution so Popular?
Richard Dawkins once said that 'Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually-fulfilled athiest.' Perhaps that is why Creationists are stereotyped as a group of Bible thumpers and scientifically-ignorant backwater folk. Evolution is taught in schools all over the world, not as a theory, but a fact.
Genetic variation is often mistaken as proof of evolution. These are often referred to as examples of 'evolution in action'. Let us examine some of these.
Evolutionary biologist Douglas Futuyama has put together a summary of examples of evolution in action in one of his books:

• Some bacteria develop resistance to certain antibiotics. Likewise, many insects resist pesticides.
  
• After a massive storm in Massachusetts, hundreds of dead birds littered the countryside. A scientist named Bumpus collected the survivors and killed them, then compared their skeletons with the birds that had died in the storm. He found that, though the size difference was minute, larger birds survived more frequently than smaller ones.
  
• Scientists have observed that some mice will stop reproducing when their local population is 'flooded' with a gene that causes their males to be sterile.
  
• In 1977, a drought on the Galapagos Islands forced Darwin's famous finches to eat larger seeds. For a while, many smaller finches died because they had trouble eating the bigger seeds.

There is no reason to doubt that the strongest organisms prosper, nor that certain circumstances make drug-resistant bacteria more prolific. The problem here is, none of these explain how organisms become other organisms, how organs become other organs, or even how the most minor changes in an organism can become permanent. All of these examples are isolated, special circumstances. Philip Johnson comments, 'That larger birds have an advantage over smaller birds in high winds or droughts has no tendency whatever to prove that similar factors caused birds to come into existence in the first place.' French zoologist Pierre Grasse says, 'The 'evolution in action' of J Huxley and other biologists is simply the observation of demographic facts, local fluctuations of genotypes, geographical distributions. Often the species concerned have remained practically unchanged for hundreds of centuries! Fluctuation as a result of circumstances, with prior modification of the genome, does not imply evolution...'
Indeed, science itself does not imply evolution. Life is far too complex to have been created by a natural force, and natural history contradicts the necessary timeline of evolution. Much of the basis for the theory of evolution is based on false or exaggerated information.