Tag: fossils

“All you need to do is find a single fossil out of place!”

Once again, I recently received an unsolicited pelting of questions by an evolutionist online, in a Biblical Apologetics group no less. The descent into tension, as per usual, begins pleasant enough, where questions regarding my opinion are disguised as genuine interest, and after cautiously answering, and wishing the best of luck in further studies, trying to disengage peaceably, there are always follow-ups, and it becomes clear that no amount of either answering questions directly, or encouraging the other to keep studying, will redirect the vendetta that has now formed in their head; a personal mission to take on the stupidity of the bumbling, misinformed Christian.

The temptation is always to fire back; to ensure the opponent there are indeed answers; that good science can be attained, and understood, and that evolution’s theoretical, absurd processes propped up by goal-post moving and fudge factors casts very reasonable doubt. But as anyone on either side of the argument knows, answering back simply begets a follow-up attack, and at some point, hopefully before rising tensions, someone just stops answering. That voice inside tells you they must feel victorious if you quit the debate, but you also tell yourself, I am a grown man, spending my Sunday arguing with someone on line who has no desire whatsoever to actually learn what my opinion is, seems silly. He wishes to prove how dumb I am, so that he can feel superior in his belief. Why? Well same reason as me; it feels good to bolster your understanding of the world, gain faith by withstanding the onslaught of counter-points. And let’s face it, it serves the ego, does it not? But Darwinian evolution has, since its inception, always served a more sinister purpose; providing intellectual ammunition for those those who desire greatly to deny God. Charles Lyell, the inventor of the geologic column, wished to save the sciences from Moses, after all. And many scientists admit the absurdity of evolution, the missing transition fossils, the circular reasoning.

In this particular case, the debate was left when the evolutionist said, “All you need to do it find a single fossil out of place. Nobody has ever done that. This is your chance: just find a fossil that has life from two different geological periods in it. That would disprove evolution.
But nobody has ever found such a fossil. You believe this to be a lie, so . . . show me the evidence that it is a lie.”

Before this, I was stating the obvious facts of geology, that the geologic column exists truncated, out of order, and in no way resembles the geologic column so artfully cartooned in text books the world over. Furthermore, that fossils are found up and down, scattered this way and that, and are out of order all the time! Clearly, and as most geologists are coming around to, the layers we see were formed through catastrophe. Of course most still believe in millions of years, but with no erosion between layers, evidence of animals being buried suddenly, soft animal fossils, and geological sorting, catastrophe is now a staple of geologic observation. So where do they put the millions of years? In between the layers! Where there is no evidence!

Why? Because in the the scientific world’s mind, evolution is a naturalist foregone conclusion, the only acceptable explanation of how we came to be, even among believers in that field, and they have been taught that it is an immutable fact of science. Furthermore, each field of science is parceled off in particular areas of expertise. The biologists “knows” the paleontologist has proof, they in turn “know” the geologist does. The geologist trusts the anthropologist has proof, and so on… so every observation is cemented into an undeniable belief that Darwinian evolution is fact.

But no transitions exist when there should logically be MILLIONS! Think about it; slow gradual change through eons of time would produce animals in droves hardly discernable from one another. How is taxonomy even possible? Well, it would seem when we find an animal in the dirt, like soft bodied jellyfish, bats, or whales, they are always the fully formed version of itself, not what Darwin was expecting. To counter this obvious fact, many began promoting various versions of punctuated equilibrium; providing through mutation, great leaps forward in evolution to explain away the lack of evidence. Keep in mind, finding no evidence doesn’t make them question the veracity of evolution. It merely causes them to double down on a previously absurd and long denied process, but recycled in some new way, giving more power to time, and mutation then has ever been observed.

So why can an evolutionist spout confidently about there having been no out of placed fossils ever found? For one, Bill Nye, in his famous debate with Ken Ham, blurted this nonsense amidst the back and forth, and it was never one of the points specifically countered. It was then pounced on as some death knell to be wielded triumphantly over the moronic creationists. But secondly, and most importantly, evolutionists, under the guise of adjusting the evolutionary model to a growing knowledge base, have taken any out of order anomaly, and either denied it, quietly acknowledged it while as little fanfare as possible, or adjusted the model to explain away the observation in a way that could not hurt the theory. The greatest part about evolution is that any number of things could have happened 100 million years ago, and no out of order fact could possibly sink the faith in this religion. So unlike good science, evolution is not making accurate predictions about what we will find (it has failed miserably in this regard), but rather, because “we already know it is true” anything we find can be adjusted to fit into it without compromising the overall belief. Then it just becomes scientists arguing for the best order of things in an echo chamber, while doubters of Darwin stare in disbelief at the utter lack of cohesiveness.

An example, you say? Well, I am glad you asked. It is not surprising that fossils are being found in the “wrong place” all the time!

  1. We find them on the surface all the time. Just laying there, getting stepped over, millions of years, in rock that can be designated to the proper geologic level depending on what fossil is in it. “The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately.” J.D O’Rourke.
  2. “If there were a column of sediments … Unfortunately no such column exists.”
    Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Earth Science 1989, p. 326
  3. Even some of the most devout evolutionists are honest when confronting misplaced fossils; highly respected coauthor of the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria, Dr. Niles Eldredge, Curator, Division of Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History, New York City, since 1969, has written that the fossils cannot be used to date the rocks that they are found in. One reason for this is that we now know that all animal and plant kinds are found all the way “back” to the beginning of Cambrian layers.
  4. Cambrian layers we now know contain even vertibrates, the most complex forms of life, which it most certainly should not, but also contains every phylum we have a classification for, that appeared in full form, and vastly different than all the others. Imagine going from bacteria to a starfish, sponge, flatworm, crab, mollusk, and vertebrate, all at once! That is some powerful evolutionary magic right there.
  5. would the wrong place include living fossils? Animals found alive after being extinct for millions of years? Horseshoe crabs. Coelacanth. What about finding a living Wollemi pine that went extinct in the fossil recorrd 150 million years ago? Would that be considered the wrong place?
  6. To correct for finds that don’t fit, columns are corrected upwards, and downwards. The Nucha vancouverensis sponge, found in Canada, in a layer 220 million years old, was found across the world in a 500 million years layer with none between, and was corrected for.
  7. Grasses were not to have been formed until way after dinosaurs, but dinosaur dung was found to have grass in it. So it was corrected.
  8. Mammals were supposed to have evolved well after dinosaurs. But a large rodent was found with dinosaur babies in its digestive tract.
  9. Dinosaurs were supposed to have evolved into birds, a recent but latched onto theory, yet birds were found in wrong layers putting them together.
  10. Guadalupe woman and her modern burial site found in a layer 28 million years old certainly provides for a misplaced set of bones.

It takes very little effort to find sharks teeth in North Dakota, whale fossils in the desert, petrified closed clams on mount Everest, and a myriad of other finds that did not hit the expected targets of evolutionary thinking. This is to say nothing of carbon found in coal, diamonds, dinosaurs, which should not be there if millions of years old. A great testimony to good science was when carbon dating was first discovered, science kept a journal that accredited scientists could add to when things were dated, and a bunch of dinosaurs, and extinct animals made it in, before the concerted effort to not publish more than half of the results, once they realized the dates were compromising the theory.

Is it worth arguing back and forth with someone who is so sure nothing has ever been found out of place the world over that would topple the evolutionary house of cards? We know full well that every result will be crammed into some reorganized version, dismissed for the larger picture, taught in compulsory schooling with the drum beat of certainty, regardless of every prediction having fallen short. Evolution is a golden calf that, despite no evidence combating abiogenesis, irreducible complexity, the language of DNA and simultaneous ability for cells to read it, no transitions, and a dating set that has no solidarity whatsoever, will not die. Because as they have admitted, “Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
[Billions and Billions of Demons – JANUARY 9, 1997 ISSUE]”
― Richard C. Lewontin

Stegosaurus

Let us consider the Stegosaurus.

This 8 to 10 ton reptile is worth considering as a fascinating piece of biological history, unique and fantastic. With two sets of bone plates extending vertically along the ridge of the backbone, and 4 large tail spikes, it possesses features no other creature has. Aside from how neat the reality of these are, we can also consider the implications in the fossil record.

Of course, evolutionists fully expected that some transitional forms would be found showing the gradual development of plates, and spikes. But like the dismal truth of all specialized creatures in the fossil record, no such transitions exist. After over a century of searching, in every case the animals appear abruptly, and in perfect form. We know this instinctively, of course, and yet are forced to continue considering the unfounded assertion of molecules to man evolution despite no evidence.

The absence of transitional fossils the world over was a problem for Darwin, and continues to be a problem for paleontologists today. But to add to the Stegosaurus observations, we will take a brief look at the magnificent jungle temples of Cambodia, produced by the Khmer civilization. Beginning as early as the eighth and extending through the fourteenth century A.D. one of, if not the greatest monarch and monument builder of this empire was Jayavarman VII, from 1181.

The relief carvings along the temple wall show various animals.

https://www.bible.ca/tracks/tracks-cambodia.htm

A monkey, parrot, lizard, water buffalo, swan, and of course this famous picture of the stegosaurus. Is it though?

Well, that would be the obvious conclusion from anyone who knew what a stegosaurus looked like, and happened upon the temple. Clearly this is a large lizard with plates along its back, and clearly there would not be many animals to choose from. Furthermore, none of the relief carvings are made up animals. But the temple was built in the 12th century, we are certainly not allowed to conclude that they actually saw one.

This is one of many ancient examples around the world of dinosaurs being depicted on pottery, tapestries, coffins, and walls all over the globe, all of which must somehow be dismissed and explained away. This one of course is no different, and the Smithsonian takes their shot at it in the 2009 article Stegosaurus, Rhinoceros, or Hoax?

In the article that can only be described as dripping with animosity against creationists, the author asserts that it cannot be a stegosaurus, and is more likely an animal surrounded by leaves, like it is in a jungle. Either that, or it must have been added later as a hoax. And to further back their claim that it MUST be something other than what it looks like, Creationists are described as those who “twist Biblical passages to support their view,” and “distort nature to fit a narrow theological view.” But calling it a bear with leaves, or saying it was carved as a joke with no evidence doesn’t sound like the creationist twisting and distorting to me.

To further back their disparagement of concluding the obvious, they invoke the evolutionary champion, Carl Sagan, and his quote: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” then further claim that evidence of dinosaurs living with man just doesn’t exist. Again I would reiterate that this is just one example of many all over the globe of every dinosaur we have a classification for being depicted in ancient art. But it is certainly ironic that they used Sagan, because the very same late evolutionist, Dr Carl Sagan, famous host of the Cosmos TV series, squarely faced the conundrum that dragon stories/art pose for evolutionists. Namely, that such stories and artifacts are found in cultures all across the globe (the strikingly realistic-looking brass behemoths adorning a 15th century cleric’s tomb in a UK cathedral, Icca stones T-Rex, and others), and that they are amazingly like several types of dinosaurs—which no one is supposed to have seen! Recognizing it quite properly as a puzzle to be solved for long-agers, he wrote a book about it, The Dragons of Eden. In this he proposed that somehow one part of our brain (the one that was inherited from whichever of our alleged reptile ancestors, in the evolutionist scenario, were living at the same time as dinosaurs) had retained its memories of what those ancestors had seen.

Did you catch that? The great Carl Sagan said that the art appears because our brains inherited the memories and images through our DNA through millions and millions of years and countless generations, from when we were just animals living alongside such creatures. So picture it now… as you are carving your wall, and forming a monkey, a parrot, a water buffalo, things you see each day, you add the exact form of one of the most unique animals known to man, with some of the most striking features along its back imaginable, because deep in your mind you were once a reptile that saw one. This passes for science? This evolutionist is held in high esteem while at every turn, the Christian who stands on the foundation of the word of God, and who can easily observe the evidence of its truth throughout nature, is being told that we are twisting and distorting facts?!

No where in the article is there any reasonable allowance whatsoever for the obvious reality, that it is what it looks like. Occam’s Razor, attributed to William of Ockham, is a principle that suggests the simplest explanation is often the correct one. The simplest, and most direct conclusion, based on observation, is that it is what it looks like. And so are the sauropods on the coffin in England. And so are the dinosaurs on the pottery in Peru. And on the Sant Jordi Tapestry, Plaza Sant Jaume, in Spain. And what’s more, Sagan knew this, and knew it so well that he felt compelled to address it. If the Smithsonian was being intellectually honest, it would acknowledge that, and perhaps spend its time coming up with a better explanation than us having the memories of when we were reptiles 60 million years ago, rather than berating Christians for accepting obvious observable data.

Gray Fossil Museum

IMG_6304

Visited the Fossil Museum in Gray TN this afternoon. There is a dig on site from which students and paleontologists are pulling out some amazing fossils. I want to preface this article by stating that I am very proud of the community for honoring the scientific find by dedicating resources to the site, as well as moving the direction of the highway in order to accommodate the dig. There are a plethora of fossil samples being pulled from the ground, two of which have been classified as new species. The exhibits are classy looking, and beautiful, and the facility, labs included, appear to be top notch.

This unfortunately is where my admiration for the project ends, as the whole site is absolutely dedicated to forcing evolutionary propaganda down each guest’s throat at every turn, and on every wall. It was egregious how prevalent the indoctrination was. Granted, I was expecting to encounter the millions-of-years mantra several times, but from the beginning 15 ft 4.5 billion year time line on the wall  at step one, to the ode to Charles Darwin hallway at the end, it dripped with the insatiable need to reinforce the religion of humanism, naturalism, and evolution.

It was never presented exactly how the dates were determined for the dig (between 4 million and 7 million years ago), but it could be deduced by both typical evolutionary presupposition and normal modus operandi that pre-determined index fossils dated the rocks, and of course the rocks date the fossils (a.k.a. circular reasoning).

In a 1979 interview with *Dr. Donald Fisher, the state paleontologist for New York, Luther Sunderland, asked him: “How do you date fossils?” His reply: “By the Cambrian rocks in which they were found.” Sunderland then asked him if this were not circular reasoning, and *Fisher replied, “Of course, how else are you going to do it?” (Bible Science Newsletter, December 1986, p. 6.)

“The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning . . because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales.”—*J.E. O’Rourke, “Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy,” American Journal of science, January 1976.

“The charge that the construction of the geologic scale involves circularity has a certain amount of validity.”—*David M. Raup, “Geology and Creationism,” Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, March 1983, p. 21.

“It is a problem not easily solved by the classic methods of stratigraphical paleontology, as obviously we will land ourselves immediately in an impossible circular argument if we say, firstly that a particular lithology [theory of rock strata] is synchronous on the evidence of its fossils, and secondly that the fossils are synchronous on the evidence of the lithology.”—*Derek V. Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphic Record (1973), p. 62.

 

“The intelligent layman has long suspected circular reasoning in the use of rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks. The geologist has never bothered to think of a good reply, feeling the explanations are not worth the trouble as long as the work brings results. This is supposed to be hard-headed pragmatism.”—*J.E. O’Rourke, “Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy,” American Journal of Science, January 1976, p. 48.

Furthermore, if you will notice the picture I took of one of their displays IMG_6303(sorry about the glare), it states another hard-nosed take on how evolutionists practice science. Let me paraphrase the sign for the laypeople that pass by it. “We here at the Gray Fossil Museum already know that these fossils are as old as we were taught in school, therefore we know we don’t have to use a test that may prove it wrong, despite the fact that C-14 has been found in everything from dinosaurs, to coal, to diamonds (see link here on Carbon dating), and may in fact be found here, which would ruin all of our predetermined expensive exhibits. We would not be able to handle reaching conclusions such as a fossil known to be 4.5 million years old with a C-14 result of 12,000 years for example, and if these conclusions were determined, we would of course throw them out based on the obvious reasoning of either contaminated specimens, leaching, our faulty testing, without once considering a change in our presuppositional position that was determined without any observable, demonstrable, repeatable testing whatsoever.”

This type of “science” has unfortunately become more normal, but is intellectually dishonest. I would be willing to bet C-14 was quite prevalent in these fossils, if one of the local scientists had the integrity and courage to test for it. But as you can see from the picture, they have already informed the public that it is wholly unnecessary.

A final note about the Gray Museum is in regards to the story they present about how these fossils got here. According to their “experts”, water leaked into a cavern under the surface, creating a sinkhole which eventually became deep, and then was filled with trapped wild life from tapirs to snakes to bear, and was then fossilized slowly over time. This conjecture makes me want to take everyone involved and set them on the rim of a sinkhole, toss in hundreds of animal carcasses, and make them camp and watch how quickly nature recycles dead flesh. (Don’t mind the smell, that’s just the rotting away of all your theories). I reiterate what science knows already, which is that fossil formation today is exceedingly rare. Is this sinkhole trap an anomaly that explains the possible thousands of trapped animals? What about the billions of other fossils all over the earth? Perhaps the earth was covered with sink holes? Ridiculous. Fossils are made when organisms are buried quickly by mud and water, and the world is filled with organisms that have been buried quickly by mud and water. Sorry Gray Fossil Museum, but it’s time to take Darwin the racist, incestuous philosopher off your wall, and start to practice real science.

35 years or 2.6 million years?

There is an intimidating section of science for believers known as radiometric dating. The presumption of an old Earth came long before this discovery, invented by those who wished to ‘save the sciences from Moses.’ Radiometric dating has since been utilized to support this presupposition. By definition it is a method of dating geological or archaeological specimens by determining the relative proportions of particular radioactive isotopes present in a sample. In layman’s terms, this simply means measuring how fast something has decayed in order to determine how old it is. I have debated many evolutionists, and in the end, many will never be able to get past this idea that the world is billions of years old. To suggest otherwise would be anathema. It is as true to them as stating water is wet, and has been beaten into their psyche from early on, from the first kids books that say millions and millions of years ago…

I remember the shocking freedom of letting that assumption go, and how the facts we observe so easily fell in line with biblical truth after that. It was truly like waking from an oppressive dream, where nothing fit, but the ‘authorities’ of science and education and television and magazines were all telling you it was so.

This is what those authorities won’t tell you. Science is filled with limiting factors that exempt creation from being old. Most dating methods point to a young earth. Only the ones that can be shown to align with our evolutionary understanding of the geologic column are kept and published, and taught. These methods are ripe with assumptions, and results are cherry picked to align with what the observer ‘knows’ already. I could write for days on dating methods, and it is such an interesting topic, that I am sure more articles will follow. But I owe you the reader more than just my opinion and conjecture. So let’s get a little more specific.

Today we will examine potassium-argon dating. Again, I want this to be understandable to as many readers as possible, so very briefly, radioactive potassium usually from igneous rock (cooled lava) decays, and argon is a byproduct of this reaction. This method is widely used as a dating method all over the Earth. Now, without getting into overly complicated chemistry, or methodology, we can simply use common sense to ascertain whether or not this is a viable method for determining specific dates.

Below is a chart from samples taken and tested from the eruption of the 1980 Mount Saint Helen’s volcano. These are samples carefully tested from a volcano we saw happen with our own eyes on May 18th of that year. Using our ‘trusty’ potassium argon dating method, used the world over for proving that fossil layers fall within geologic parameters, we arrived at the following dates:

AGE-RadioDate-Fig13-HelensChart-400x300

 

This study indicated that, barring tolerances, the rock formed from that 1980 explosion was between 300,000 years old and 3,400,000 million years old. We saw it form 35 years ago!

This error is extraordinary, but what is beyond comprehension is that rather than call in to question the methodology, science has instead thrown out the results, and continued to utilize the method. I could ask a 5 year old, “what do these results tell you, considering a large part of science as we know it consists of observation?” It would be clear to anyone being intellectually honest that though still valuable in determining composition and how geological events relate to each other, the method’s ability to determine geological time was an abysmal failure.

There are results like this from other events as well; Hawaii, the Philippines. This means that we assume the results are bad when they do not correlate with what we know, but when we do not know, the results are accepted, based on our assumptions. I would ask you, is that science? is that an observable, demonstrable, repeatable result? Should they teach the geologic column, index fossils, dating accuracy based on these results?

But they do. And they start young. And by the time you are in college you have heard the mantra of millions of years so often that you have become indoctrinated. And if someone then comes along and tells you, the bible is accurate in its chronology, you might scoff in derision at the implication.

What does our bible say about this possibility? That the prevailing opinion would state things have continued on the same way all along, i.e. uniformitarianism. That there was no evidence of God’s hand upon the earth?  I would point to this warning.

2 Peter 3:3-4 “Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.” 

____________

UPDATE:  – Rock collected for radiometric dating was pulled from Mt. Ngauruhoe in New Zealand, from cooled magma flow from the years 1949, 1954, and 1975. This was tested and an age of 3,908,000,000 years was observed. Actual date of fifty years vs 3.9 billion. This is a discrepancy of 7.8 billion percent.