The delivery of the 6,000-year-old news to believers and non-believers alike is the initiative of a group of Dutch Christian organisations, who have already carried out a similar operation over the border, reaching some 6.6 million homes. The occasion then was the bicentennial of the birth of Darwin.

The organisers claim to have had expressions of interest from across Europe. However the brochure exists for the moment only in Dutch, which explains why Flanders is being given priority. "Right now we're looking into how we can cover the whole of Flanders in a systematic way, one of the organisers told De Standaard. "We have contacts with friendly organisations in Belgium, but they're active only locally. We're looking for a nationwide network whose services we can call on."

The brochure, according to a version found online, attempts to present a logical case for the universe's having been created by God. Man can make only living things, it argues. And a room cannot tidy itself. Therefore, the brochure concludes, it is nonsense to suppose, with the Darwinists, that life in its many forms developed by chance. The only logical explanation for the existence of life is that it was created all at once by a supernatural being.

"It is technically not possible to prove whether man came on the earth through creation or through evolution, because it is an event in the past," the document concludes, rather oddly. "History is written from a given point of view, for particular reasons," it claims, despite having used the Bible as evidence for some of its claims.

"Most people won't even read it, I suppose," responded Ghent university philosopher Johan Braeckman.

The eight-page brochure can be read online at

http://www.creatie.info/books/bookid/3