In its 19 June, 2007, edition Avvenire, a daily newspaper affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church and based in Milan, the center of the Italian press, carried a second report concerning Atlas of Creation. The report in the Italian-language paper, which enjoys a circulation in excess of 100,000, was written by Fiorenzo Facchini, and said:
“...The monumental Atlas of Creation by the Turkish Muslim author Harun Yahya (real name Adnan Oktar) was written for that purpose and maintains that the history of life on Earth is to be explained in terms of creation, with no evolutionary process being involved.
This scientific work (the first volume in a series of 7) is an exceedingly attractive photographic documentation of life forms that existed in the past… The book describes fossilized life forms and concludes that evolution could have never happened by showing pictures of living things.
One harsh criticism of evolution is the absence of the intermediate forms assumed to have existed during an evolutionary process that lasted for hundreds of millions of years, and that should therefore have been documented. In the author’s view, this means that the various life forms must be regarded as having been created or made extinct by Allah (God). ‘All life is the product of a perfect design...’ (p. 751) But ‘God ... needs no "designs" in order to create. ... His planning and creation take place at the same instant. Whenever God wills a thing to come about, it is enough for Him just to say, "Be!"’ (p. 627) Frequent extracts from the Qur’an show that religion helps science…
With accusations on account of Nazism, communism, terrorism and materialism, which the book says are Darwinism’s worrying consequences, it incites a counter-reaction to the ‘evolution deceit’…”
