Muslim creationism part 2

This is part of a series about the book “The Creation of the Universe” by Adnan Oktar. View Part 1.

Chapter 1: The creation of the universe from nothingness

This chapter is essentially about the Big Bang. Oktar describes the redshift discovered by Edwin Hubble and the Cosmic Background Radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson and concludes (along with almost all scientists) that those observations are explained better by the big bang theory than Hoyle’s steady state theory.

He rules out the possibility of oscillations on the grounds that some entropy would be lost with each oscillation and therefore the oscillations would eventually stop. I’m not sure this is true, but if it is, doesn’t mean that we aren’t in an oscillating universe. He also rules out the idea of the universe being a quantum fluctuation (and therefore not needing a creator) because if so, it would be arising from a quantum vacuum, which is not “nothing”. I don’t see why this is a problem – we have no reason to assume the universe came from nothing. It could have come from something. In fact, Oktar is arguing that it came from God (surely God counts as a something?), and in absence of any evidence, we can equally hypothesize that it might have come from a quantum vacuum. So this argument is just ridiculous.

Of course, having established that the big bang happened and having assumed (with no evidence) that before the big bang there was nothing, he rhetorically asks who created it and concludes it must be Allah. His only evidence of this is to quote a few chapters of the Quran, particularly one which says that the heavens and earth were once “sewn” together and were “unstitched”. He uses these terms to try and say that the arabic word for sewn together implies a cosmic egg and that unstitching implies tearing apart or destroying as in an explosion. Most translations of the Quran have nothing about this and basically just say that the heavens and earth were together and God parted them (21:30).

This is about as scientifically accurate as the Maori creation myth which says that the earth mother Papatuanuku and the sky father Ranginui were together in a close embrace until their children (particularly Tane, god of the forest) forced them apart.