Muslims bring creationism to Europe.

last updated 8 January 2015

Netherlands

Nicolien den Boer

America isn’t the only place where science is under siege, said Nicolien den Boer in Amsterdam’s Radionetherlands.nl. Muslim creationists are waging a stealth campaign to try to make Europeans doubt the truth of evolution. They have blitzed European schools with copies of an 800-page Islamic textbook called The Atlas of Creation. The Turkish author, Harun Yahya, holds that Darwin’s theory “is responsible for all the evil in the world, including international terrorism.” Unlike some American creationists who claim that the world is only 6,000 years old, Yahya contends that the earth is millions of years old, but that all of its species were created at once and remain unchanged. Copies of the book have appeared “by the tens of thousands” in many European languages. So many French schools received multiple copies, in fact, that the French Education Ministry had to warn schools not to use the book. It does have a certain seductive appeal, with its beautiful binding and its hundreds of color plates. But secular Europeans needn’t worry. Most education ministers believe school principals “will be smart enough” to see the book for what it is: “pseudoscientific nonsense.”