The mosquito beats its wings some 500 times a second; human beings can manage to wave their arms to a very limited extent in the same amount of time. If scientists could ever build such a powerful mechanism, it would soon burn up due to the intense friction. And yet a mosquito accomplishes this feat for as long as it lives, flying at a high speed in the direction it chooses and for as long as it desires. In addition, it has been endowed with the most perfect maneuvering and landing abilities.
A mosquito requires a high level of oxygen to beat its wings at this speed. Therefore, it has a special respiratory passage that immediately reaches every cell in its body. Since this passage is directly connected to the outside air, its cells engage in oxygen exchange without the need for any intermediate substances. As a result, a mosquito never becomes tired.
Creating such a wing in a creature that is less than1 cm(0.4 inch) in size, together with a respiratory system that makes this possible, is a display of Allah’s astonishing artistry. No coincidence can give rise to such a perfect mechanism in such a complex life form and endow it with perfect functioning, or give it a pair of wings that can beat 500 times per second simultaneously. Such a flawless creature and its amazing wings could not have come into being through random stages, as proposed by Darwin:
Verily whoever dwells in the heavens or the Earth belongs to Allah. Those who invoke others instead of Allah, associating them with Him in His Divinity, only follow conjectures and are merely guessing. (Surah Yunus, 66)
Harun Yahya in Radiance weekly. Here
By "neo-atheism", I mean a tripartite belief system founded on the conviction that science provides the only road to truth and that all religions are deluded, irrational and destructive.
Atheism is just one-third of this exotic ideological cocktail. Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in fact, atheism is a metaphysical position and secularism is a view of how society should be organised. So a Christian can easily be a secularist - indeed, even Christ was being one when he said, "Render unto Caesar" - and an atheist can be anti-secularist if he happens to believe that religious views should be taken into account. But, in some muddled way, the two ideas have been combined by the cultists.
The third leg of neo-atheism is Darwinism, the AK-47 of neo-atheist shock troops. Alone among scientists, and perhaps because of the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins, Darwin has been embraced as the final conclusive proof not only that God does not exist but also that religion as a whole is a uniquely dangerous threat to scientific rationality.
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A couple of years ago I hired a car at Los Angeles Airport. The radio was tuned to a religious station. Too terrified to attempt simultaneously to change the channel and drive on the I-405, the scariest road in the world, in a strange car, I heard to my astonishment that Christopher Hitchens was the next guest on a Christian chat show.
In his finest fruity tones and deploying $100 words, Hitchens took the poor presenter apart. Then he was asked if this would be a better world if we disposed of all religions. "No," he replied. I almost crashed the car.
The answer demonstrates the futility of the neo-atheist project. Religion is not going to go away. It is a natural and legitimate response to the human condition, to human consciousness and to human ignorance. One of the most striking things revealed by the progress of science has been the revelation of how little we know and how easily what we do know can be overthrown. Furthermore, as Hitchens in effect acknowledged and as the neo-atheists demonstrate by their ideological rigidity and savagery, absence of religion does not guarantee that the demonic side of our natures will be eliminated. People should have learned this from the catastrophic failed atheist project of communism, but too many didn't.
Bryan Appleyard in NewStatesman. Here
