Sep 5, 2009

The Atlas of Creation and Debunking Its Creationist Hypothesis



Though modern scientists have made great strides in helping to understand our natural world and have been extremely successful at it - we do not have an idea of what life would be like without our advanced understanding of ourselves - there has been a serious and concerted effort to discredit the findings of particular branches of science, if those branches of science contradict certain theological edicts.

Perhaps the most contested of all is evolution, which posits that species change over time through natural selection and mutation. I need not go into how and why it is contested. It's pretty obvious how it flies in the face of, er, the Bible.

Scientists, historically, have been adept at the science side of everything, though when it comes to talking about it and doing the PR for science, well, not so much. The documentary Flock of Dodos points out just how seemingly incapable scientists have been at publicly discrediting arguments against scientific findings. Their logic is that the findings should stand for themselves. With the evidence all there, in their opinions, there shouldn't be any need to defend it against evidence-less theories.

Modern Creationist theorists and the people who fund them, on the other hand, are flooding the marketplace of ideas with religious pseudoscience in an attempt to win the "argument" or "controversy" over evolution. No such controversy exists in actual science. It just simply does not. Think of it like this: it's not dissimilar to the recent "Birther" movement, in which people claimed that President Barack Obama was not in fact our president because - they claimed - he was not born in the US. It has been repeatedly debunked by most reputable sources, and yet these people continue to demand to be heard because of their beliefs, however irrational.



One of the most recent attacks on evolution comes in the form of the book The Atlas of Creation. The difference between The Atlas of Creation and other creationist doctrine is that its proprietor, Harun Yahya, is an Old-Earth Creationist, which basically means that he believes the Earth is millions of years old but has gone through no significant changes.

And if you flip through one of the books, you might be surprised at how similar the fossils depicted truly are when set against "examples" of their modern (and unchanged) counterparts. The problem is that, in most cases, the fossils and the modern examples are not even the same genus, let alone the same species, which makes it absolutely ludicrous on more than one level. If you watch the above video (part one of four whole parts), starring neo-atheist Richard Dawkins, you can see him discuss how and why the book is utter nonsense, all with a sense of humor.

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