I did a post a while back about questions I'd ask about Original Sin that lead to my opinion on it...So, here are some questions I'd ask about the Theory of Evolution...
To me...if I'm gonna say I believe something...I am going to be able to tell you why. I'm going to be able to plead my case...and...well...yeah...pretty much hammer you with questions and facts to support my position. ;)
Problem for me with the Theory of Evolution is that if I decided today to believe it...there's no way I'd be able to convince someone else to also believe it...and I don't feel comfortable taking a position I can't fight for and defend...
For me, just imagining the complexity and amazing-ness of even simple creatures like fish...Now, why would any sea creature even begin to start to grow an apparatus to breathe air? No need to breathe air. They do what they do beautifully the way they are. And, like, so, even if somehow for some crazy reason all of the libraries of information necessary to make lungs just randomly happened...lungs do not make a fish able to live on land.
For me...things that lead to answers that don't make sense...make me come to a screeching halt no matter what it is. It's why I'm not a Republican OR a Democrat. It's why I stopped hitting/spanking my kids. It's why I abandoned bottle feeding and breastfed my 3rd thru 8th children. It's why I've abandoned so many things I was "taught" in my life...because once I realize that the questions have no answer...to continue in blind faith in my belief is just not me.
Problem for me with the Theory of Evolution is that if I decided today to believe it...there's no way I'd be able to convince someone else to also believe it...and I don't feel comfortable taking a position I can't fight for and defend...
An atheist/evolutionist once said something to me like, "...denying evolution is like denying gravity and electricity. I don't understand those completely either but my lack of understanding has nothing to do with whether gravity and electricity work."
But, I see and feel (experience) gravity all the time. I see and feel electricity all the time. I see evidence of both every day at any time of the day. But, I experience no evidence of evolution. None. And, it's not that I'm asleep or not able to see the evidence...there just is none to see in my daily life...
I'm not OK with that. I can't believe something I experience no evidence of. And, every pro-evolutionist I've talked to has resorted to, "Well, I don't know all the answers, just Google it!" Basically, they go somewhere I am not personally comfortable with and that is admitting (but not admitting!) they don't really have "facts" to support their belief...they "just believe."
To me that sounds like a religion. And, tho' I believe in God I really REALLY can't stand religion!
So let me begin...
QUESTIONS about EVOLUTION...
But, I see and feel (experience) gravity all the time. I see and feel electricity all the time. I see evidence of both every day at any time of the day. But, I experience no evidence of evolution. None. And, it's not that I'm asleep or not able to see the evidence...there just is none to see in my daily life...
I'm not OK with that. I can't believe something I experience no evidence of. And, every pro-evolutionist I've talked to has resorted to, "Well, I don't know all the answers, just Google it!" Basically, they go somewhere I am not personally comfortable with and that is admitting (but not admitting!) they don't really have "facts" to support their belief...they "just believe."
To me that sounds like a religion. And, tho' I believe in God I really REALLY can't stand religion!
So let me begin...
QUESTIONS about EVOLUTION...
For me, just imagining the complexity and amazing-ness of even simple creatures like fish...Now, why would any sea creature even begin to start to grow an apparatus to breathe air? No need to breathe air. They do what they do beautifully the way they are. And, like, so, even if somehow for some crazy reason all of the libraries of information necessary to make lungs just randomly happened...lungs do not make a fish able to live on land.
You know? It's not like all that's necessary for a fish to be on land would be the ability to breathe...
As far as fish (or any ocean dwelling creature) coming out onto land...
As far as fish (or any ocean dwelling creature) coming out onto land...
I'd wonder about...
- their skin and how it would react to sun and air. There'd be no need to change the skin while still IN the water because fish skin (scales and slime) are perfect (and beautiful) for living in water...so why would it change? What would prompt the organism to start changing from scales to skin and fur?
- And...if it did...then the change to be suitable to life outside water would likely make it weaker and more vulnerable to predators IN the water and it may not have survived. Wouldn't this make the organism less likely to be able to reproduce? What would the transitional form between scales and skin be? How would it even start to happen? This question alone about scales to skin and all of the things you could ask about just this could fill a book...
- I'd wonder about how digestion would work without such a multitude of water. When fish eat they're gobbling down LOTS of water with their food. Now, they'd eat and only have air? How would their digestive tracts work with so MUCH less water?
- how would the ocean creatures, accustomed to all that salt water adapt to the fresh water they'd get on land with their food? How would their bodies adapt to not getting salt? What's the difference between creatures that need all that salt and those that don't and how would they change? What would happen in between?
- while still in the water, there'd have been no need to start changing the digestive system to eat dry things without all that salt...with less water going thru the system all the time...so how would this happen and why? And, if the system would have started changing this may have also been a problem for the survival of the changing creature?
- temperature regulation systems...how do they work? In the water...I would imagine it's probably not varied in temperature and so no need to "sweat" or for "cooling" but once out on land the temperatures can get pretty extreme and so what about sweating...how did that whole system develop? And, some water-dwelling creatures are pretty finicky about temperatures and temperature changes in particular, so, just how did they suddenly become ok with the new temperatures?
- their skin and how it would react to sun and air. There'd be no need to change the skin while still IN the water because fish skin (scales and slime) are perfect (and beautiful) for living in water...so why would it change? What would prompt the organism to start changing from scales to skin and fur?
- And...if it did...then the change to be suitable to life outside water would likely make it weaker and more vulnerable to predators IN the water and it may not have survived. Wouldn't this make the organism less likely to be able to reproduce? What would the transitional form between scales and skin be? How would it even start to happen? This question alone about scales to skin and all of the things you could ask about just this could fill a book...
- I'd wonder about how digestion would work without such a multitude of water. When fish eat they're gobbling down LOTS of water with their food. Now, they'd eat and only have air? How would their digestive tracts work with so MUCH less water?
- how would the ocean creatures, accustomed to all that salt water adapt to the fresh water they'd get on land with their food? How would their bodies adapt to not getting salt? What's the difference between creatures that need all that salt and those that don't and how would they change? What would happen in between?
- while still in the water, there'd have been no need to start changing the digestive system to eat dry things without all that salt...with less water going thru the system all the time...so how would this happen and why? And, if the system would have started changing this may have also been a problem for the survival of the changing creature?
- temperature regulation systems...how do they work? In the water...I would imagine it's probably not varied in temperature and so no need to "sweat" or for "cooling" but once out on land the temperatures can get pretty extreme and so what about sweating...how did that whole system develop? And, some water-dwelling creatures are pretty finicky about temperatures and temperature changes in particular, so, just how did they suddenly become ok with the new temperatures?
- what if the creature who 1st left the water was carnivorous? They crawl out onto land where there is no animal life to eat yet. So...they would have had to start eating plants and what about that? The nutritional needs of carnivores vs herbivores, and their digestive systems are different. So, if the 1st creature to crawl outta' the water was a carnivore, it woulda' been looking for critters to eat and there'd have been none...but others like him...and, so how did this critter even begin to think of eating plants instead of live moving things? If this is possible, can't snake owners train their pet snakes to eat veggies instead of having to buy them live rats?
- So, how did the 1st carnivores adapt to eating only plants...and how did this critter know which plants were edible or poisonous since it's whole system had been adapted to eating only critters? So so many questions here...
- I would wonder about the way their eyes would focus without looking through water and sometimes in direct sunlight. You've opened your eyes underwater before, right? Burns, doesn't it? Hard to see, isn't it? It's totally different than looking at things thru air. This is super different especially if we're talking about a deep-water creature. Why would it start to adapt to bright sunlight and air? So, we're to believe the 1st critter got outta' the water and was able to see properly in air to be able to find food, shelter, and mates?
- eyelids. I can't think of any fish with eyelids? How did they develop and why? Again...to form eyelids and all the muscles and neural pathways necessary to operate them...and tear ducts...and eye lashes...etc...any of these things would be libraries of info TO ADD to the creature...not just some simple thing like breeding a dog to be more furry. Where did this NEW information come from and WHY?
- I'd wonder about their way of reproducing in their way of finding mates (sometimes thru scents in water...now how?) I'd wonder about their way of courtship (ways of moving and showing off in the water) and the actual mechanics of mating...how did this change to be able to go from some frantic show off of swimming prowess to now there on land. Now, what do they do? And, what to do if their way of mating in water was that the female had laid eggs in the sand and then the male fertilized it by swimming by and squirting out his milt? How did "sex" then develop and uteruses etc. as opposed to this egg laying bit? This is a huge HUGE big change. Why would a critter go from laying eggs to developing a uterus?
- all critters incubate in SPECIFIC conditions...even chicken eggs are so testy. Have to be at just the right temp and humidity. How did the conditions for proper incubation of the fetal-stage of critters change without them all dying in the process?
- fins to legs. How and why would this happen? A fish is a perfectly designed creature for life in the water. Any alteration or "mutations" to their fins to make them mobile on land would have rendered them slower than their counterparts and probably more likely to be eaten. Like, did the fins turn into legs or did legs develop and the fins went away? And, wouldn't legs make a fish less streamlined and less able to maneuver in the water? More likely to be eaten by a predator? Especially if the fins turned into legs...the fins would have been rendered totally useless before the legs were useful for land...and...what if the legs came before lungs?
- Any of these individual changes would have been radical and amazing but in order for the survival of the mutant...all these things would have had to have happened RANDOMLY at the same time...at the same time that it'd happen to an opposite sex one so that they COULD reproduce.
I do see that in my aggressive fish tank those 20 goldfish we put in there the other day have now dwindled down to one BLACK goldfish. I see that in the wild...how the gold ones would be eaten more by predators and it might eventually happen that all the goldfish with orange dna would be all gone and the only ones that'd survive to keep passing on their genes would be the naturally camouflaged ones. But, that's not evolution...because no new information was added...and the fish...is still a fish...
- I'd wonder why the fossil evidence just isn't there. There are no dats or cogs. No evidence of anything becoming something completely different. Supposedly one small breeding group of lemurs is responsible for all 26 (?) different lemurs on...shoot where is that? Madagascar :) And, that makes sense...that thru breeding you can go from one type of lemur to a buncha' other types...but you don't see lemurs turning into something ELSE...
We can get a Chihuahua and a Great Dane from the same canine ancestor thru selective breeding...BUT...there is NO NEW information added in that process. No new info only selecting specific traits we want to see expressed. A Chihuahua is really a dog who is LACKING in information.
And, no amount of tinkering with dogs has led to a cat or some NEW species. Dogs are always dogs. Cats are always cats. Horses are always horses...unless you get them to reproduce with a donkey and they make something which CANNOT REPRODUCE but is still pretty much like a horse.
Thinking of going from a reptilian type creature (dinosaur...I've heard that they might not be exactly lizards but something like lizards but different but whatever) to a bird...is huge. SO MUCH new information and again...all of the in-betweens would not have survived their mutations. A lizard which was changing into a bird but not yet a bird yet would have been vulnerable to predation more than his kin and so...not so likely to reproduce. And, so there should be SOOOO many fossils of these in between stages and there just...are...none.
- I'd wonder why do we have bacterial that are supposedly UNCHANGED over BILLIONS of years but yet other bacterials went on to become us somehow?
- I'd wonder why morality came about? Morality is useless for evolution because in evolution it's the survival of the fittest...but, morality makes the "best" people be the weakest because they're the ones NOT out for themselves...so this...would seem to be totally contrary to evolution's way of moving forward...and it would seem that moral "apes" woulda' dun died off fastest 'cause they wouldn't have been the nice ones...and just watch TV. It's the toughest strongest ones who get to mate and eat...
- I'd wonder about the maid. There's that pesky 2nd Law of Thermodynamics which is just a big science term to mean that things tend toward disorder...meaning...you don't clean your house it becomes a mess! You don't mow your grass and your house becomes a Mayan ruin...We see this in our daily experience...now...not zillions of years ago...we see it now that without someONE to care for things they get all out of order...so how did we go from some primordial soup to the complexities of my brain or the human eye...just by chance?
And, I could give you a list of 100 more questions... Questions I have no answers for and have heard no answers that I would feel confident presenting to someone else and saying, "Here! Here's why YOU should believe evolution!" And, until I'd be able to answer all those questions (and more) logically...and powerfully...without fear of getting into a discussion even with a Creation Scientist...I would not be able to say, "Evolution! I believe!"
And, the "lots of time" card doesn't do it for me because no matter HOW MUCH TIME you mix into things...it still had to happen SOMEHOW...so HOW? How and why did it happen? I see no sense in it. I see no current evidence of it...
God's not even entered the discussion so far...
Honestly...I'd believe that aliens planted us here before I'd believe evolution.
And, even if aliens planted us here, I'd still have to ask, "Well, where did THEY come from..." because you can't go back in time endlessly (infinitely) using the "this caused this" explanation...Ultimately, something uncaused had to cause it all and that uncaused "thing" is either some uncaused uncreated self-existent bit of matter...or an intelligent being with power over all...
- So, how did the 1st carnivores adapt to eating only plants...and how did this critter know which plants were edible or poisonous since it's whole system had been adapted to eating only critters? So so many questions here...
- I would wonder about the way their eyes would focus without looking through water and sometimes in direct sunlight. You've opened your eyes underwater before, right? Burns, doesn't it? Hard to see, isn't it? It's totally different than looking at things thru air. This is super different especially if we're talking about a deep-water creature. Why would it start to adapt to bright sunlight and air? So, we're to believe the 1st critter got outta' the water and was able to see properly in air to be able to find food, shelter, and mates?
- eyelids. I can't think of any fish with eyelids? How did they develop and why? Again...to form eyelids and all the muscles and neural pathways necessary to operate them...and tear ducts...and eye lashes...etc...any of these things would be libraries of info TO ADD to the creature...not just some simple thing like breeding a dog to be more furry. Where did this NEW information come from and WHY?
- I'd wonder about their way of reproducing in their way of finding mates (sometimes thru scents in water...now how?) I'd wonder about their way of courtship (ways of moving and showing off in the water) and the actual mechanics of mating...how did this change to be able to go from some frantic show off of swimming prowess to now there on land. Now, what do they do? And, what to do if their way of mating in water was that the female had laid eggs in the sand and then the male fertilized it by swimming by and squirting out his milt? How did "sex" then develop and uteruses etc. as opposed to this egg laying bit? This is a huge HUGE big change. Why would a critter go from laying eggs to developing a uterus?
- all critters incubate in SPECIFIC conditions...even chicken eggs are so testy. Have to be at just the right temp and humidity. How did the conditions for proper incubation of the fetal-stage of critters change without them all dying in the process?
- fins to legs. How and why would this happen? A fish is a perfectly designed creature for life in the water. Any alteration or "mutations" to their fins to make them mobile on land would have rendered them slower than their counterparts and probably more likely to be eaten. Like, did the fins turn into legs or did legs develop and the fins went away? And, wouldn't legs make a fish less streamlined and less able to maneuver in the water? More likely to be eaten by a predator? Especially if the fins turned into legs...the fins would have been rendered totally useless before the legs were useful for land...and...what if the legs came before lungs?
- Any of these individual changes would have been radical and amazing but in order for the survival of the mutant...all these things would have had to have happened RANDOMLY at the same time...at the same time that it'd happen to an opposite sex one so that they COULD reproduce.
I do see that in my aggressive fish tank those 20 goldfish we put in there the other day have now dwindled down to one BLACK goldfish. I see that in the wild...how the gold ones would be eaten more by predators and it might eventually happen that all the goldfish with orange dna would be all gone and the only ones that'd survive to keep passing on their genes would be the naturally camouflaged ones. But, that's not evolution...because no new information was added...and the fish...is still a fish...
- I'd wonder why the fossil evidence just isn't there. There are no dats or cogs. No evidence of anything becoming something completely different. Supposedly one small breeding group of lemurs is responsible for all 26 (?) different lemurs on...shoot where is that? Madagascar :) And, that makes sense...that thru breeding you can go from one type of lemur to a buncha' other types...but you don't see lemurs turning into something ELSE...
We can get a Chihuahua and a Great Dane from the same canine ancestor thru selective breeding...BUT...there is NO NEW information added in that process. No new info only selecting specific traits we want to see expressed. A Chihuahua is really a dog who is LACKING in information.
And, no amount of tinkering with dogs has led to a cat or some NEW species. Dogs are always dogs. Cats are always cats. Horses are always horses...unless you get them to reproduce with a donkey and they make something which CANNOT REPRODUCE but is still pretty much like a horse.
Thinking of going from a reptilian type creature (dinosaur...I've heard that they might not be exactly lizards but something like lizards but different but whatever) to a bird...is huge. SO MUCH new information and again...all of the in-betweens would not have survived their mutations. A lizard which was changing into a bird but not yet a bird yet would have been vulnerable to predation more than his kin and so...not so likely to reproduce. And, so there should be SOOOO many fossils of these in between stages and there just...are...none.
- I'd wonder why do we have bacterial that are supposedly UNCHANGED over BILLIONS of years but yet other bacterials went on to become us somehow?
- I'd wonder why morality came about? Morality is useless for evolution because in evolution it's the survival of the fittest...but, morality makes the "best" people be the weakest because they're the ones NOT out for themselves...so this...would seem to be totally contrary to evolution's way of moving forward...and it would seem that moral "apes" woulda' dun died off fastest 'cause they wouldn't have been the nice ones...and just watch TV. It's the toughest strongest ones who get to mate and eat...
- I'd wonder about the maid. There's that pesky 2nd Law of Thermodynamics which is just a big science term to mean that things tend toward disorder...meaning...you don't clean your house it becomes a mess! You don't mow your grass and your house becomes a Mayan ruin...We see this in our daily experience...now...not zillions of years ago...we see it now that without someONE to care for things they get all out of order...so how did we go from some primordial soup to the complexities of my brain or the human eye...just by chance?
And, I could give you a list of 100 more questions... Questions I have no answers for and have heard no answers that I would feel confident presenting to someone else and saying, "Here! Here's why YOU should believe evolution!" And, until I'd be able to answer all those questions (and more) logically...and powerfully...without fear of getting into a discussion even with a Creation Scientist...I would not be able to say, "Evolution! I believe!"
And, the "lots of time" card doesn't do it for me because no matter HOW MUCH TIME you mix into things...it still had to happen SOMEHOW...so HOW? How and why did it happen? I see no sense in it. I see no current evidence of it...
God's not even entered the discussion so far...
Honestly...I'd believe that aliens planted us here before I'd believe evolution.
When I look around me right now...I can tell the difference between a random rock and a "rock" that was once part of a piece of Mayan pottery because although the shard of broken pottery is very rock-like, it clearly shows purpose and design. When I look at the whole world...I see the same purpose and design in every living thing. To believe that all this LIFE and order is "random" and came as a result of random things caused by the uncreated self-existent bit of matter...that doesn't make sense.
To think all this LIFE and order was purposely designed and created by an intelligent all-powerful being makes a heck of a lot more sense...
To think all this LIFE and order was purposely designed and created by an intelligent all-powerful being makes a heck of a lot more sense...
Once, I was asking a biologist on Facebook how we got to all of this ORDER...and what do we do with the 2nd law of thermodynamics? How do the 2 work together? Once the "Big Bang" (explosion which normally causes chaos and destruction) happened...how did all the "order" happen? Why didn't disorder take over? Explain!
He told me I was stupid...and unfriended/blocked me.
As I said earlier, to me...if I'm gonna say I believe something...I am going to be able to tell you why. I'm going to be able to plead my case...and pretty much hammer you with questions and facts to support my position. I can't do that with the Theory of Evolution...I just can't...
For further reading...I've added links and stuff collected from the internet below...
(And, notable is that even when reading about these hoaxes and frauds in left-leaning sources is their quick and timid admission of the hoax or fraud and their quick explanation of how "Creationists try to use this against evolution." They protect evolution with all they've got...)
Evolutionary hoaxes
Piltdown Man
The Piltdown Man was a hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknownearly human. These fragments consisted of parts of a skull and jawbone, said to have been collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex, England. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawn-man", after the collector Charles Dawson) was given to the specimen. The significance of the specimen remained the subject of controversy until it was exposed in 1953 as a forgery, consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan deliberately combined with the skull of a fully developed modern human.
The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous paleoanthropological hoax ever to have been perpetrated. It is prominent for two reasons: the attention paid to the issue of human evolution, and the length of time (more than 40 years) that elapsed from its discovery to its full exposure as a forgery.
From 1912 to 1953, college textbooks would treat the Piltdown Man as scientific evidence of Darwin's theory. The bulk of the scientific community accepted the Piltdown Man as true.
Before the Piltdown Man, the Java Man in 1891 was also accepted for a while and then proven a fraud. A few years after the Piltdown Man, the Nebraska Man, "discovered" in 1922, was not formally rejected by Science until 1927.
Nebraska Man Hoax (mistake)
Nebraska Man was a name applied to Hesperopithecus haroldcookii, a putative species of ape. Hesperopithecus meant "ape of the western world," and it was heralded as the first higher primate of North America. Haroldcookii was given as the species name in reference to the original discoverer of the tooth, Harold Cook. It was originally described by Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1922, on the basis of a tooth that rancher and geologist Harold Cook found in Nebraska in 1917. The discovery was made around ten years after the finding of Piltdown Man, another possible human ancestor that turned out to be a hoax. Although Nebraska man was not a deliberate hoax, the original classification proved to be a mistake.
Piltdown Chicken: Archaeoraptor
"Archaeoraptor" is the generic name informally assigned in 1999 to a fossil from China in an article published in National Geographicmagazine. The magazine claimed that the fossil was a "missing link" between birds and terrestrial theropod dinosaurs. Even prior to this publication there had been severe doubts about the fossil's authenticity. It led to a scandal when evidence demonstrated it to be a forgerythrough further scientific study. The forgery was constructed from rearranged pieces of real fossils from different species. Zhou et al. found that the head and upper body actually belong to a specimen of the primitive fossil bird Yanornis.[1] A 2002 study found that the tail belongs to a small winged dromaeosaur, Microraptor, named in 2000.[2] The legs and feet belong to an as yet unknown animal.[3][4]
Haeckel's Embryos
The theory of recapitulation, also called the biogenetic law or embryological parallelism— often expressed in Ernst Haeckel's phrase as"ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"—is a largely discredited biological hypothesis that in developing from embryo to adult, animals go through stages resembling or representing successive stages in the evolution of their remote ancestors.
He told me I was stupid...and unfriended/blocked me.
As I said earlier, to me...if I'm gonna say I believe something...I am going to be able to tell you why. I'm going to be able to plead my case...and pretty much hammer you with questions and facts to support my position. I can't do that with the Theory of Evolution...I just can't...
And, the reason I don't believe God created the earth through evolution is this...because He is love...
For further reading...I've added links and stuff collected from the internet below...
(And, notable is that even when reading about these hoaxes and frauds in left-leaning sources is their quick and timid admission of the hoax or fraud and their quick explanation of how "Creationists try to use this against evolution." They protect evolution with all they've got...)
Evolutionary hoaxes
Piltdown Man
The Piltdown Man was a hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknownearly human. These fragments consisted of parts of a skull and jawbone, said to have been collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex, England. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawn-man", after the collector Charles Dawson) was given to the specimen. The significance of the specimen remained the subject of controversy until it was exposed in 1953 as a forgery, consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan deliberately combined with the skull of a fully developed modern human.
The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous paleoanthropological hoax ever to have been perpetrated. It is prominent for two reasons: the attention paid to the issue of human evolution, and the length of time (more than 40 years) that elapsed from its discovery to its full exposure as a forgery.
From 1912 to 1953, college textbooks would treat the Piltdown Man as scientific evidence of Darwin's theory. The bulk of the scientific community accepted the Piltdown Man as true.
Before the Piltdown Man, the Java Man in 1891 was also accepted for a while and then proven a fraud. A few years after the Piltdown Man, the Nebraska Man, "discovered" in 1922, was not formally rejected by Science until 1927.
Nebraska Man Hoax (mistake)
Nebraska Man was a name applied to Hesperopithecus haroldcookii, a putative species of ape. Hesperopithecus meant "ape of the western world," and it was heralded as the first higher primate of North America. Haroldcookii was given as the species name in reference to the original discoverer of the tooth, Harold Cook. It was originally described by Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1922, on the basis of a tooth that rancher and geologist Harold Cook found in Nebraska in 1917. The discovery was made around ten years after the finding of Piltdown Man, another possible human ancestor that turned out to be a hoax. Although Nebraska man was not a deliberate hoax, the original classification proved to be a mistake.
Piltdown Chicken: Archaeoraptor
"Archaeoraptor" is the generic name informally assigned in 1999 to a fossil from China in an article published in National Geographicmagazine. The magazine claimed that the fossil was a "missing link" between birds and terrestrial theropod dinosaurs. Even prior to this publication there had been severe doubts about the fossil's authenticity. It led to a scandal when evidence demonstrated it to be a forgerythrough further scientific study. The forgery was constructed from rearranged pieces of real fossils from different species. Zhou et al. found that the head and upper body actually belong to a specimen of the primitive fossil bird Yanornis.[1] A 2002 study found that the tail belongs to a small winged dromaeosaur, Microraptor, named in 2000.[2] The legs and feet belong to an as yet unknown animal.[3][4]
Haeckel's Embryos
The theory of recapitulation, also called the biogenetic law or embryological parallelism— often expressed in Ernst Haeckel's phrase as"ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"—is a largely discredited biological hypothesis that in developing from embryo to adult, animals go through stages resembling or representing successive stages in the evolution of their remote ancestors.
Scientific Facts in the Bible
1. Only in recent years has science discovered that everything we see is composed of invisible atoms. Here, Scripture tells us that the "things which are seen were not made of things which do appear."
2. Medical science has only recently discovered that blood-clotting in a newborn reaches its peak on the eighth day, then drops. The Bible consistently says that a baby must be circumcised on the eighth day.
3. At a time when it was believed that the earth sat on a large animal or a giant (1500 B.C.), the Bible spoke of the earth’s free float in space: "He...hangs the earth upon nothing" (Job 26:7).
4. The prophet Isaiah also tells us that the earth is round: "It is he that sits upon the circle of the earth" (Isaiah 40:22). This is not a reference to a flat disk, as some skeptic maintain, but to a sphere. Secular man discovered this 2,400 years later. At a time when science believed that the earth was flat, is was the Scriptures that inspired Christopher Columbus to sail around the world (see Proverbs 3:6 footnote).
5. God told Job in 1500 B.C.: "Can you send lightnings, that they may go, and say to you, Here we are?" (Job 38:35). The Bible here is making what appears to be a scientifically ludicrous statement—that light can be sent, and then manifest itself in speech. But did you know that radio waves travel at the speed of light? This is why you can have instantaneous wireless communication with someone on the other side of the earth. Science didn’t discover this until 1864 when "British scientist James Clerk Maxwell suggested that electricity and light waves were two forms of the same thing" (Modern Century Illustrated Encyclopedia).
6. Job 38:19 asks, "Where is the way where light dwells?" Modern man has only recently discovered that light (electromagnetic radiation) has a "way," traveling at 186,000 miles per second.
7. Science has discovered that stars emit radio waves, which are received on earth as a high pitch. God mentioned this in Job 38:7: "When the morning stars sang together..."
8. "Most cosmologists (scientists who study the structures and evolution of the universe) agree that the Genesis account of creation, in imagining an initial void, may be uncannily close to the truth" (Time, Dec. 1976).
9. Solomon described a "cycle" of air currents two thousand years before scientists "discovered" them. "The wind goes toward the south, and turns about unto the north; it whirls about continually, and the wind returns again according to his circuits" (Ecclesiastes 1:6).
10. Science expresses the universe in five terms: time, space, matter, power, and motion. Genesis 1:1,2 revealed such truths to the Hebrews in 1450 B.C.: "In the beginning [time] God created [power] the heaven [space] and the earth [matter] . . . And the Spirit of God moved [motion] upon the face of the waters." The first thing God tells man is that He controls of all aspects of the universe.
11. The great biological truth concerning the importance of blood in our body’s mechanism has been fully comprehended only in recent years. Up until 120 years ago, sick people were "bled," and many died because of the practice. If you lose your blood, you lose your life. Yet Leviticus 17:11, written 3,000 years ago, declared that blood is the source of life: "For the life of the flesh is in the blood."
12. All things were made by Him (see John 1:3), including dinosaurs. Why then did the dinosaur disappear? The answer may be in Job 40:15–24. In this passage, God speaks about a great creature called "behemoth." Some commentators think this was a hippopotamus. However, the hippo’s tail isn’t like a large tree, but a small twig. Following are the characteristics of this huge animal: It was the largest of all the creatures God made; was plant-eating (herbivorous); had its strength in its hips and a tail like a large tree. It had very strong bones, lived among the trees, drank massive amounts of water, and was not disturbed by a raging river. He appears impervious to attack because his nose could pierce through snares, but Scripture says, "He that made him can make his sword to approach unto him." In other words, God caused this, the largest of all the creatures He had made, to become extinct.
13. Encyclopedia Britannica documents that in 1845, a young doctor in Vienna named Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis was horrified at the terrible death rate of women who gave birth in hospitals. As many as 30 percent died after giving birth. Semmelweis noted that doctors would examine the bodies of patients who died, then, without washing their hands, go straight to the next ward and examine expectant mothers. This was their normal practice, because the presence of microscopic diseases was unknown. Semmelweis insisted that doctors wash their hands before examinations, and the death rate immediately dropped to 2 percent. Look at the specific instructions God gave His people for when they encounter disease: "And when he that has an issue is cleansed of his issue; then he shall number to himself even days for his cleansing, and wash his clothes, and bathe his flesh in running water, and shall be clean" (Leviticus 15:13). Until recent years, doctors washed their hands in a bowl of water, leaving invisible germs on their hands. However, the Bible says specifically to wash hands under "running water."
14. Luke 17:34–36 says the Second Coming of Jesus Christ will occur while some are asleep at night and others are working at daytime activities in the field. This is a clear indication of a revolving earth, with day and night at the same time.
15. "During the devastating Black Death of the fourteenth century, patients who were sick or dead were kept in the same rooms as the rest of the family. People often wondered why the disease was affecting so many people at one time. They attributed these epidemics to ‘bad air’ or ‘evil spirits.’ However, careful attention to the medical commands of God as revealed in Leviticus would have saved untold millions of lives. Arturo Castiglione wrote about the overwhelming importance of this biblical medical law: ‘The laws against leprosyin Leviticus 13 may be regarded as the first model of sanitary legislation’ (A History of Medicine)." Grant R. Jeffery, The Signature of God With all these truths revealed in Scripture,how could a thinking person deny that the Bible is supernatural in origin? There is no other book in any of the world’s religions (Vedas, Bhagavad-Gita, Koran, Book of Mormon, etc.) that contains scientific truth. In fact, they contain statements that are clearly unscientific. Hank Hanegraaff said, "Faith in Christ is not some blind leap into a dark chasm, but a faith based on established evidence." (11:3 continued)
- Lack of a viable mechanism for producing high levels of complex and specified information. Related to this are problems with the Darwinian mechanism producing irreducibly complex features, and the problems of non-functional or deleterious intermediate stages. (For details see: "The NCSE, Judge Jones, and Bluffs About the Origin of New Functional Genetic Information," "Do Car Engines Run on Lugnuts? A Response to Ken Miller & Judge Jones's Straw Tests of Irreducible Complexity for the Bacterial Flagellum," "Opening Darwin's Black Box," or "Can Random Mutations Create New Complex Features? A Response to TalkOrigins");
- The failure of the fossil record to provide support for Darwinian evolution. (For details, see "Punctuated Equilibrium and Patterns from the Fossil Record" or "Intelligent Design Has Scientific Merit in Paleontology");
- The failure of molecular biology to provide evidence for a grand "tree of life." (For details, see: "A Primer on the Tree of Life");
- Natural selection is an extremely inefficient method of spreading traits in populations unless a trait has an extremely high selection coefficient;
- The problem that convergent evolution appears rampant -- at both the genetic and morphological levels, even though under Darwinian theory this is highly unlikely. (For details, see "Convergent Genetic Evolution: 'Surprising' Under Unguided Evolution, Expected Under Intelligent Design" and "Dolphins and Porpoises and...Bats? Oh My! Evolution's Convergence Problem");
- The failure of chemistry to explain the origin of the genetic code. (For details, see "The origin of life remains a mystery" or "Problems with the Natural Chemical 'Origin of Life'");
- The failure of developmental biology to explain why vertebrate embryos diverge from the beginning of development. (For details, see: "Evolving views of embryology," "A Reply to Carl Zimmer on Embryology and Developmental Biology," "Current Textbooks Misuse Embryology to Argue for Evolution");
-The failure of neo-Darwinian evolution to explain the biogeographical distribution of many species. (For details, see "Sea Monkey Hypotheses Refute the NCSE's Biogeography Objections to Explore Evolution" or "Sea Monkeys Are the Tip of the Iceberg: More Biogeographical Conundrums for Neo-Darwinism");
- A long history of inaccurate predictions inspired by neo-Darwinism regarding vestigial organs or so-called "junk" DNA. (For details, ] see: "Intelligent Design and the Death of the 'Junk-DNA' Neo-Darwinian Paradigm," "The Latest Proof of Evolution: The Appendix Has No Important Function," or "Does Darrel Falk's Junk DNA Argument for Common Descent Commit 'One of the Biggest Mistakes in the History of Molecular Biology'?);
- Humans show many behavioral and cognitive traits and abilities that offer no apparent survival advantage (e.g. music, art, religion, ability to ponder the nature of the universe).
The Biggest Problems for Evolution
by John D. Morris, Ph.D.
The design of living things has always been a huge problem for evolutionists. Even the simplest single-cell organism is unimaginably complex, with scores of highly sophisticated parts, all performing important functions and all mutually interdependent. The laws of statistics have convinced all who have bothered to calculate the odds that even something as basic as a protein molecule could never arise by chance, consisting as it does of a chain of hundreds of precisely arranged amino acids.
And such a protein molecule is trivial compared to any of the working parts of a cell. When it is recognized that all of these parts must be present and functioning at the start, it must be admitted that life is impossible without an Intelligent Designer. Actually, every living thing gives such strong evidence for design that only willfully ignoring the data (2 Peter 3:5) could lead one to assign such intricacy to chance and natural selection. Every living thing, from simple bacteria to people, possesses the marvelous DNA code, which contains a library full of precise information, and without which life is impossible.
Another fatal problem for evolution—which, if it occurred at all, occurred in the long-ago past—lies in the nature of the fossil record, which is the only physical record we have of life in the past. As is now being admitted by my evolutionary colleagues, the fossil record gives no clue that any basic type of animal has ever changed into another basic type of animal, for no undisputed chain of in-between forms has ever been discovered.
Each basic type is distinct in the modern world and in the fossil record, although there is much variation within these basic types. While gradual “Darwinian” evolution has always predicted that transitional forms would one day be found, the current rage in evolutionary circles is the concept of rapid evolution, or “punctuated equilibrium”—proposing that small isolated portions of a larger population evolved rapidly and left no fossils. But where is the evidence that they evolved at all?
Even though the gaps in the fossil record are found between each basic animal type, there are two huge gaps in particular that should be emphasized. The evolutionary distance between single-cell organisms and the vast array of multicellular, highly complex marine invertebrates precludes even rapid evolution. In the supposedly 600-million-year-old layers of rock designated as Cambrian (which contain the first appearance of varied multi-cell life), sponges, clams, trilobites, starfish, etc., are found without the required evolutionary ancestors.
The gap from marine invertebrates to the vertebrate fish is likewise immense. To make matters worse for the evolutionists, fish fossils are also found in Cambrian strata. If evolution is true, fish must have evolved from something, and invertebrates must also have evolved from something. Evolution has no ancestor to propose, but the evidence exactly fits the creation model, which insists that each animal type was created fully formed, with no evolutionary transition.
The evidence for creation is so strong, it is illogical to believe anything else. Only a religious commitment to atheism, or a desire for the approval of those atheists who call themselves scholars, could lead one down this path. The Bible says that those who deny creation are “without excuse” (Romans 1:20).
