Zakir Naik's rant against evolution

Here is Zakir Naik from India (also, here is a link to his Islamic Research Foundation). He is a smaller version of Harun Yahya. Recently, he mailed a thin booklet, The Qu'ran and Modern Science, to faculty members across the US (several faculty members at Hampshire got these - and they all dumped those on me :( ).

So here is his rant against evolution:


There is nothing new here. One good thing about his rant is that it is not constrained by reality (hmm...no Galileo was not sentenced to death (he was convicted of vehement suspicion of heresy), Darwin did not abandon natural selection in 1861 (yes, there were early challenges to the idea of natural selection - but Darwin did not abandon it), there are more than four hominid species, humans did not evolve from apes, etc etc etc). And you'll get a headache if you follow his logic of why the Church (I'm assuming the Catholic Church) and scientists accept evolution.

More disappointingly, he is using the same old creation arguments with a hodge-podge of names and historical claims. C'mon. I'm still waiting for some innovative ideas from Muslim creationists. So far they have only presented half-baked ideas from creation science (that makes these ideas 1/4 baked - as creation science itself consists of half-baked ideas). By the way, note that he did not mention Harun Yahya once. Clearly, they are battling for the same audience. However, unlike Haru Yahya, Zakir Naik has not made crusade against evolution as the cornerstone of his ideology. On my last visit to Pakistan, I did see Zakir Naik's DVDs competing in numbers with Harun Yahya's. Can he replace Yahya as the biggest creationist crackpot in the Muslim world? From what I have seen so far, I doubt it. Yahya has been able to exploit the internet far more effectively, and his strategy of provoking a reaction in Europe and in the US has been very successful for his anti-western image.