I appreciate your taking the time and effort to provide me with that information because you strongly believe in what you believe, and I know that when you believe in something you’d like to share it with others, so I appreciate that gesture.

Best to you and peace.

I also wrote an article about some of the links you provided. Take a look at how Harun Yahya distorts the facts.
http://tinyfrog.wordpress.com/2007/09/24/harun-yahya-iraqi-information-minister-of-creationism/

In the end, it has very little to do with science and looking at evidence objectively
That’s exactly the point I was making about the creationists in the video.

Like I said – any time you want science-based rebuttals of creationist arguments, I can provide you with plenty of literature, and my offer always stands.

It’s interesting that you took note of the scientists and their backgrounds but not their arguments. As one scientist stated in the video and I’m paraphrasing: A scientist must be willing to face the evidence and accept it, even if it goes against previous beliefs. It appears that you will believe in Evolution no matter what evidence is presented or questions raised concerning it, and that is because you have made a choice. I may not agree with your choice because I’ve chosen something differently, but I respect it because you have the freedom to believe as you choose.

In the end, it has very little to do with science and looking at evidence objectively, but it has everything to do with what the heart is telling us to believe and not to believe.

Peace.

I don’t follow you, and don’t think this example relates to my example of how everything around us points to a creator.

Your argument was that: “When we look around us, we acknowledge that the houses and apartments we live in were created by engineers, that the clothes we wear were created by clothes designers, that the computers we use to blog and even have this conversation were created by people. Everything has a creator behind it. To say that these things did not have a creator, would be considered unreasonable.”

I’m saying that it is reasonable to say houses, clothes, and computers have designers. But biological life gets to play by some other rules. That’s what my analogy is all about. You’re arguing that w, x, and y (houses, clothes, and computers) behave certain ways, and therefore z (life) follows that same pattern. But, I say that’s a false comparison because z (life) can evolve, but w, x, and y (houses, clothes, and computers) can’t. What you are doing is sort of like saying: “rocks fall, sticks fall, and pencils fall when I let go of them, and therefore, helium-filled balloons fall when I let go of them, too.” It’s just plain false to think you can infer a creator in biological life just because houses, clothes, and computers need a creator.

The video is pretty deceitful the way they present the situation. But, then, I’m not at all surprised.

It looks like tinyfrog did do the math already. And who said anything about converting all of America to Islam? 15 thousand years is a long time away, so don’t worry. Thanks for visiting our blog

If 20 thousand Americans convert per year, and there are 300 million Americans, it will take 15 thousand years to convert us all.

That is of course ignoring the 2.5 million Americans born every year.

It’s sort of like saying, “every time I let-go of an object it falls to the ground. Therefore, I believe a helium-filled balloon will fall to the ground when I let go of it.”

I don’t follow you, and don’t think this example relates to my example of how everything around us points to a creator. The entire universe doesn’t follow the law of gravity since in space there is no gravity.

I believe that humans and animals evolve, but not in the way Darwin says that they do.

And even if I wanted to believe in Darwins theory of Evolution, it still doesn’t subtract God from the equation. I disagree that life can ratchet up to more complex forms on its own. Something has to cause that to happen.

There is a good movie you or others might be interested in watching. It talks about how the cell could not have come about by the Evolutionary process. And the movie is not from Harun Yahya.

Intelligent Design – Unlocking the Mysteries of Life

Here are some articles you might read:

Poll Results in France Show 92% of People Do Not Believe in Evolution

The Atlas of Creation of Fossil Exhibitions Cause Panic in Turkey and France

The Impact Broad of the Atlas of Creation

And some works by Harun Yahya you might be interested in reading:

The Collapse of the Theory of Evolution in 20 Questions

A Definitive Reply to Evolutionist Propaganda

The Collapse of the Theory of Evolution in 50 Themes

The Evolution Deceit

Atlas of Creation

Darwinism Refuted

New Research Demolishes Evolution

The Disasters Darwinism Brought to Humanity

I haven’t heard evolutionists saying anything about Harun Yahya other than his harassment against Turkish evolutionists and that his ideas are not supported by the evidence. I did lookup the information related to the WordPress ban. Most of it was in Turkish, but there was one page that was in English. It contained all kinds of stuff about drugs, mental institutions, etc. Those allegations might very well be falsely “slandering” him, although apparently those webpages were created by a rival Muslim (Edip Yuksel, born in Turkey) who is not an evolutionist. According to the letter Harun Yahya sent to wordpress: “Since Edip Yuksel and his crime organization could easily start new blogs in your site, they had even launched a campaign in opening defamation blogs regarding my client and had explicitly expressed this organized endeavor in his defamation blogs”. I suspect that the “slandering Harun Yahya with all kinds of lies” is not coming from evolutionists at all, but from his rival, Edip Yuksel.

Recently Harun Yahya has come out with a book called the Atlas of Creation, which many are hailing as the best argument against Evolution. I’m waiting to see if Richard Dawkins or other scientists are going to be able to argue intellectually against this book or are they just going to abuse Harun Yahya.
My guess is that these are the “best argument against Evolution” within the Muslim world (rather than simply “best argument against Evolution”), which is why you are hearing so much about them. I haven’t seen much in the way of rebuttal, of his “Atlas of Creation”, but here are a few I managed to find via google:
http://scienceblogs.com/scientificactivist/2007/07/more_impressions_of_the_atlas.php
http://www.helium.com/tm/502098/mysterious-called-atlas-creation

I have seen Harun Yahya’s videos online, and they didn’t have much content. It’s mostly reworked stuff from American creationists, or simple statements like “this organism hasn’t changed in X million years”. I remember one video comparing the fossil versions of these organisms to the modern versions and thinking that the comparison was very superficial, and that the fossil image wasn’t good enough for a good comparison anyway. Having taken a number of biology courses, I know that my biology and anatomy professors could always notice details that I didn’t, and I suspect Harun Yahya is doing the same thing – telling people the animals are the same, even though a biologist seeing the video could start listing the differences. Also, genetic analysis reveals that the so-called “living fossils” have undergone significant amounts of evolution – they aren’t living fossils at all – their physical structure is similar, but their genetics have undergone significant amounts of change.

Also, I updated my creation-evolution page with some more information over the past few days. (I don’t think you saw the updates yet.) I included a little information on the evidence for human descent from apes (based on fossils and genetic evidence). If I’m not mistaken, Harun Yahya thinks all animals were individually created, and there is no common descent. That position would be hard to maintain in the face of the fossil and genetic evidence.

Even Darwin, the founder of Evolution was uncertain about his theory.
There’s been a lot of misinformation coming from the creationist side about this. He actually wasn’t uncertain about his theory. There are, however, lots of quote-mines of Darwin (taking his words out of context), and some false information about Darwin refuting his own theory later in life. For example, creationists often quote this line from Darwin:
“To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.”

But, never show the next part of his statement:
“…Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case…” (And then Darwin goes on to talk about how the eye might’ve evolved.) We call that “quote-mining” and it is a dishonest tactic that creationists use to make it look like evolutionists don’t believe evolution happened. What Darwin was doing in this passage was setting up argument – he acknowledges the potential criticism, but then shows that it is wrong. When creationists quote-mine him, they show the part where he acknowledges the criticism, but then avoid showing his rebuttal to that criticism. Lot’s of evolutionists have been dishonestly quote-mined by creationists.

The ultimate reason why I can’t believe in Evolution is because it claims that chance and selection created everything… Everything has a creator behind it.
When you get down on a genetic level, you can understand how life can slowly “ratchet up” to a more complex form of life. Biological life has properties that permits it to slowly improve without an external designer – which makes it very different than a house, a poem, or other constructions. Comparisons to those things are bound to fail. It’s sort of like saying, “every time I let-go of an object it falls to the ground. Therefore, I believe a helium-filled balloon will fall to the ground when I let go of it.” Yes, it makes intuitive sense to say that based on previous experience, but for deeper reasons, it’s wrong. Further, not only is it possible for evolution to work, but based on the fossil record and genetics, there is evidence that life on earth actually used these evolutionary mechanisms.

I should also say that a number of Christian evolutionists believe that evolution was the mechanism God used to create life. Ken Miller (author of “Finding Darwin’s God”) and Richard Colling (author of “Random Designer: Created from Chaos to Connect with Creator”) are advocates of both evolution and Christianity. Evolution and theism are not incompatible, though it requires a different view of theistic actions than most people were raised to believe.