Muslim creationism part 6
This is part of a series about the book “The Creation of the Universe” by Adnan Oktar. View Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.
Chapter 5: The blue planet
The chapter starts by describing the conditions on each planet in turn, from Pluto to Mercury and noting that they are all too cold, too hot and lacking in oxygen for us to live on. Earth on the other hand, has the right temperature and amount of oxygen for us to live. There are two possible reasons for this: either we evolved to live under these conditions or the planet was designed specifically to suit us. Oktar explicitly rules out evolution as impossible and thus concludes that Earth had to be designed for us, and that the designer must have been Allah.
His rejection of evolution is a bit bizarre. He clearly has no idea what evolution actually is. He defines evolution as Lamarkian adaption – the idea that changes in an animal during it’s lifetime could be passed on to its children, and rightly claims that there is no evidence for this. He also gives the lack of life on other planets as further evidence against evolution, since he seems to think that evolution implies that life can adapt to any conditions whatsoever (“little green creatures living on Pluto who … breathe helium instead of oxygen and who drink sulfuric acid instead of water”).
Oktar explicitly rejects the idea of any kind of life except carbon based. I think he’s overreaching to say that all scientists reject the possibility of any non-carbon based life anywhere in the universe but I will agree that carbon’s chemical properties and relative abundance do seem to make it by far the most likely building block for life. And given that we are carbon and water based life forms, it comes as no surprise that the temperature range on earth is compatible with the temperature range in which organic compounds and liquid water exist.
The next few sections again try to make it seem amazing that we (creatures that are made of liquid water) existing on a planet that largely has temperatures in which water is liquid. His argument is that everything about the earth is absolutely perfectly suited for us to live there: distance from the sun, size, orbital inclination, rotation period, magnetic field, air pressure, amount of oxygen, surface gravity etc.
What he doesn’t explain is, if it was designed just for humans by the most powerful and wise being in the universe, why is it so inhospitable to life? 2/3 of the ocean is covered by salt water, which we can’t live in or on. The poles are too cold, the deserts are too hot and have too little water and the mountains have too little oxygen. Looking across the planet as a whole, there is actually only relatively small areas near sea level, particularly around coastlines, near fresh water, away from volcanoes, in temperate and tropical zones in which we can live. If this planet was designed specifically for us, why is so much of it so unfriendly to us?