Friday, December 25, 2009

Muslim Cleric Challenges Darwin: We Are Descendants of Human Beings, Jews Are Brothers of Apes and Pigs


December 6, 2009 on Al-Aqsa TV
Transcript:
Abd Al-Majid Al-Zindani: Against the backdrop of this campaign, Darwin's evolutionists began to rely on illusions, which they present as evidence. They said: "Look! Your body has vestigial organs that you inherited from your ancestors, the apes." God help us! Our ancestors were not apes. Their ancestors may have been apes, but ours were human beings. [...]

[The Darwinists] say: "Look at this creature. We found it in a lower stratum, and we found this more developed [creature] in a higher stratum." Okay, let's say people come after us, and find archeological remains of a handcart. Then they find bicycle in the stratum above it. Then, in the stratum above that, they find a motorbike, and in the stratum above that, they find a car. "Aha! We have discovered how the car developed and where it came from. The car used to be a handcart. Then there were natural developments and bla bla... and it turned into a bicycle, and there were other conditions, and it turned into a motorbike and from a motorbike, it turned into a car. Look how it developed." Can anybody accept such logic? If there was really such a sequence, it proves that this creature came after that one, but not that it developed from it. There is a difference between the two. [...]

We must not rule out the possibility that Darwin had hidden psychological feelings. Darwin was reviled just like the Jews, who are told: "You are the brothers of apes and pigs." Allah transformed the Israelites who rebelled against him into apes and pigs, and it has become a curse used against them. Perhaps Darwin was upset and wanted to say to people: "You are all apes and pigs. It's not just us." Therefore, we can see that this theory is not based on sound foundations, and does not have sufficient proof. So today, it is considered to be a theory which used to be prevalent, but which lost many of its supporters, who renounced it, and which has become like a past legend. [...]

What remains for us to say is that the principle in which they believe is the principle of coincidence. The whole business happened by coincidence. If you said that a book could be created by coincidence, nobody on the face of the earth would accept it. Moreover, an Islamic scholar said: "If we took a million apes with a million typewriters, and these million apes were to type for a million years would a poem by [Egyptian poet] Ahmed Shawqi accidentally be created?" What is this? This is something that science, reason, and truth cannot accept.

9 comments:

  1. The analogy the cleric uses of carts evolving into motorcars is a very poor one. Evolution through natural selection requires things (like animals) that reproduce and pass on their genetic heritage to the next generation. While I've seen cars humped over one another, it was because one driver failed to break in time; not because they were trying to reproduce.

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  2. roteradamus anonymusDecember 25, 2009 at 2:10 PM

    @ Credo Absurdum - Agreed. And it's not just a bad analogy. Abd Al-Majid Al-Zindani uses a straw man fallacy here to make his point.

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  3. Proponents and lovers of science would do well to repeatedly hammer home the connection between ignorant islamic clerics and the actively ignorant violently stupid creationists in the west. 

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  4. Is it just me, or does his beard make him look a bit like an orangutan?

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  5. If Richard Dawkins were in this debate he would say that a "principle of coincidence" is exactly what evolution by natural selection is not.  So, yes, a straw man argument is at least one of the fallacies that Mr. Orangatun-who-thinks-the-red-beard-makes-him-look-like-Mohammed resorts to here.  But rather than getting angry about this idiotic thinking of a typical muslim zealot, I would say that Darwin and any evolutionist who agrees with Darwin ought to be satisfied to know that they have won the debate.  You always know you have won the debate when your opponent resorts to straw man tactics.

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  6. I can tolerate opposing points of view, and I can even tolerate outright ignorance, but I cannot, and will not, tolerate outright lying as this cleric is engaging it.  It's one thing to be ignorant of the facts supporting another person's argument, but it's something else entirely to choose to outright lie about what that other person's argument is in order to score points against it.  The people engaging in this bullshit tactic are not merely mistaken.  They are liars.  They know they're full of shit and they just do not care.  Lying in order to support a religious cause is considered acceptable to them.    We need to stop calling them stupid or ignorant because that's letting them off the hook and absolving them of responsibility.  They aren't just dumb.  They are quite clever, and cleverly good at lying and they lack the moral sense to care about what that's a bad thing to do.

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  7. Actually, I love his handcart-car analogy. Because there really was a process of evolution by natural selection at work there! It's called memetics, douche-bag!

    #analogyfail

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  8. >>Guest
    <span>Or maybe an orangutan looks like him.
    </span>

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  9. I keep thinking I´ve come across the stupidest creationist argument ever and then something like this comes along. His beard is awesome though.

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