The Atlas of Creation

Contents

The books argue that life forms on Earth have never undergone even the slightest change and have never developed into one another. The book shows pictures of million-year-old fossils and pictures of modern-day animals that are claimed to be their modern equivalent. Thus, the book suggests that living things are exactly the same today as they were hundreds of millions of years ago. In other words, they never underwent evolution but were created by God.

Distribution

In 2007 tens of thousands of copies of the book were given to schools, prominent researchers and research institutes throughout the United States and Europe, including to a large number of French, Belgian, Spanish and Swiss schools. Some of the schools that received copies were in France as well as prominent researchers at Utrecht University, University of Tilburg, University of California, Brown University, University of Colorado, University of Chicago, Brigham Young University, Stony Brook University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Georgia, Imperial College London, Abertay University, the University of Idaho, the University of Vermont, and several others. When the book was sent to French schools and universities, controversy resulted and the book sparked further concern about Islamic radicalism in France.

Reception

The arguments used by the book to undermine evolution have been criticized as illogical, while evolutionary biologist Kevin Padian has stated that people who had received copies were “just astounded at its size and production values and equally astonished at what a load of crap it is." adding that "[Oktar] does not really have any sense of what we know about how things change through time.” Biologist PZ Myers wrote: "The general pattern of the book is repetitious and predictable: the book shows a picture of a fossil and a photo of a living animal, and declares that they haven't changed a bit, therefore evolution is false. Over and over. It gets old fast, and it's usually wrong (they have changed!) and the photography, while lovely, is entirely stolen."

Richard Dawkins reviewed the book, noting that it contains a number of factual errors, such as the misidentification of a sea snake as an eel (one is a reptile, the other a fish) and in two places uses images of fishing-lures copied from the internet instead of actual species. A number of other modern species are mislabelled. He concludes: "I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content. Is it really inanity, or is it just plain laziness — or perhaps cynical awareness of the ignorance and stupidity of the target audience — mostly Muslim creationists. And where does the money come from?"

Council of Europe

The Committee on Science and Education of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in its report, called The dangers of creationism in education, argued:

In his numerous anti-Darwinist works, [Yahya] tries to prove the absurdity and unscientific nature of the theory of evolution, which is for him only one of Satan’s greatest deceptions. However, the pseudo-scientific method he uses in his work The Atlas of Creation cannot in any way be considered scientific. The author tries to prove the non-scientific nature of the theory of evolution by taking and challenging the evidence of evolution. He does not mention any prior questioning. Moreover, as he only compares photographs of fossils to photographs of current species he provides no scientific proof for these statements. Even better, ..., on page 60 of this work we see a superb photograph of a fossil of a perch with a claim in the caption that this fish has not evolved over millions of years. That, however, is wrong: a detailed study of the fossil and perches living today shows that, on the contrary, they have evolved a great deal. Unfortunately, Yahya’s book is full of this type of falsehood. None of the arguments in this work are based on any scientific evidence, and the book appears more like a primitive theological treatise than the scientific refutation of the theory of evolution. It may be noted that Yahya says he has the support of major scientists. They would also have to be specialists in the biology of evolution! ... By only presenting facts without any theory or proof, Harun Yahya abuses the credulity of individuals who listen to him or read his works. Moreover, as Jacques Arnoult emphasises, the BAV and Harun Yahya in Turkey, just like the American Institute for Creation Research, resort to partial, indeed erroneous, references to develop their creationist arguments. The authors do not hesitate to quote magazine articles that defend evolution but they succeed in turning the meaning round by shortening the quotations. This is nothing less than intellectual dishonesty, which is particularly harmful.