That is true, it doesn't give us the details. The Bible has already told us how the world was created the first time around (in 6 literal days), and so it is taken for granted that once again "by the word of God" it will be a literal creation within the same period of time. You cannot have evolution and the bible together -- they don't mix.

Beryl

There are many facts that interrelate.

(a) The patterns of rock formation, deformation, and erosion
(b) The fossils we find in those rocks
(c) Continental drift
(d) Volcanos and volcanic rocks
(e) Meteorites
(f) Glacial transportation
(g) Radioactive materials
(h) Pressure/temperature issues
(i) Magnetic data
...

It isn't just fossils

/Bevin

Of all those issues, fossils is the only one that presents a concern for creationists. The issue there is why the order is the way it is. Creationists have plausable explanations for the other issues. And as I noted before, the fossils create their own set of concerns for evolutionists.

Meteorites have nothing to do with fossils, but...
http://www.antarcticconnection.com/antarctic/science/meteorites.shtml
http://geology.cwru.edu/~ansmet/

thermoluminescence is worth researching
Google it

Obsidian hydration dating is completely different again
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_hydration_dating

/Bevin

Here are just some of the questions to which evolutionists don't know the answers, beyond unsupported theory:

They have to say, "We really don't know how living organisms came from non-living material, because biogenesis is the cornerstone of modern biology;" "We really don't know for sure what the conditions were like when life first arose on earth;" "We really don't know whether or how coacervates and micropheres, two early organic compounds, crossed over into the living world;" "We don't know how eukaryotes evolved;" "We really don't know for sure if prokaryotes were the first organisms on earth;" "We really do not know how the earth formed and what its early history was;" "We really do not know how the main elements of life-- carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen-- could have formed simple organic compounds important to life;" "We honestly don't know for certain if the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere has been constant over time;" "We don't know what the ancestor of the horse was;" "We don't know why no living organisms were preserved in the precambrian fossils;" ""We don't know why the bat suddenly appears in the fossil record without any evidence of its having an ancestor;" "We don't know why there are no transitional forms known for the most prolific group of animals, the rodents, which first appear in the late Palocene period;" "We don't know why the fossil record supplies us with no transitional forms between any of the major groups or kinds;" "We don't know for sure if our theories of homologous structures, vestigal organs, biochemistry, and embryological development really show the evolutionary relationships between different species of organisms."

Here is a quote from a biology textbook about how life arose on this earth according to evolutionary theory:

"About 5 billion years ago, life arose on earth, generated from non-living matter. Such spontaneous generation could not occur on earth today...The unique circumstances under which life spontaneously arose are no longer present on earth."

HOW DO THEY KNOW? Answer: THEY DON'T. It is obvious the evolutionists' belief requires faith. It contradicts one of the most solid truths of modern science: life only comes from life; it never has been observed or known to come from nonliving matter.

Even though many lab experiments have been conducted in order to synthesize a living cell, none have been successful. How life was formed on the surface of the earth remains, for evolutionists, a mere theory.

Except that it isnt. Too many abberations have been discovered, to the point of significantly debunking the long-age myth. Been through some of that on another thread.

It just seems to me from my reading that Gentry was not given a fair shake by people who had reason to oppose Gentry's experiments because they contradict basic tenets of evolutionary theory. Gentry provides documentary evidence of this in his book. I'm not certain that Gentry is right in his theory, but it does look like he could be, or at the very least that his experiments are worthy of being taken much more seriously than they have been. In any case, I do know that there were/are lots of people who obviously did not want his experiments to be completed or his conclusions to become accepted. That is made clear in the transcripts of the trial as well as in the correspondence with various organizations and scientists. If these scientists thought that Gentry's ideas were so easy to prove wrong, why didn't they present their evidence and their arguments at Gentry's lectures, when he asked them to question him in public in order to see if his ideas would stand up under the closest scrutiny?



I don't know why mention is made of "the factoring in of mutation and selection and acceptable alternatives," because what we are dealing with is the calculation of the probability of the appearance, by chance alone, of certain essential elements of life, certain large molecules, proteins for instance. Therefore, so far as I'm concerned, we aren't focusing in on the probability of everything evolving exactly as it has, since that would entail an even far greater improbability than the formation of a single molecule of high dissymmetry of, say, 0.9. At any rate, that was the basis of Guye's calculations.

The main question is whether you believe that the theory of probability would indicate that the chance of life arising out of non-life is (a) nil, (b) highly unlikely, (c) likely, or (d) highly likely. I believe myself that it would be virtually impossible. However, I've read that Julien Huxley, a famous evolutionist, believed that anything can eventually happen by chance, if only given enough time. He even said that if given enough time-- millions of years-- a group of monkeys could sit down at their typewriters and inevitably at some time during that long period produce the Encyclopedia Brittanica word for word and in exact order. I don't have as much faith in time as Huxley did. No matter how much time you multiply 0 x something, you will always get 0. To me, 0 is what people are trying to multiply when they attempt to get life from nonliving matter.







I freely admit that I don't know how to explain the shell-fish and the Cliffs. It seems to me that neither creationists nor evolutionists have a good explanation.

But I would be interested to know if you believe in the flood that the Bible describes in Genesis and refers to in Matthew 24:37 and again in 2 Peter 2:5 and 3:6?

I think that assuming there was a flood such as the Bible describes, it makes sense that a great deal of animal life died both on land and in the water. But whether those that died included this number of shell-fish and whether it would explain the Cliffs, I am not at all sure. It's one of the subjects I plan to research and for which I want to see if I can find a plausible explanation.







Yes, you are right, of course. I did not mean to imply that penises are restricted to mammals. I am only asking about their evolution, assuming for the moment that they did evolve. How did it happen that both the male and the female reproductive systems evolved when we lack all evidence of such evolution in the fossils? Doesn't it seem a little strange that we have no evidence in the fossil record of any transition from non-sexual to sexual reproduction? After all, the evolution of the sexual reproductive system must have taken millions of years, yet where are the transitional life-forms that reproduced in some other way prior to "the ones which probably all used the same copulatory mechanisms we do"? Again, the male and female reproductive systems are extremely complex and could not have simply occurred overnight fully developed but must have evolved over millions and millions of years. It is hard to imagine how those life-forms were reproducing while they were evolving their present sexual organs. How are we to conceive that this could have happened?





I notice that they are called whales, albeit primitive ones. That is somewhat like the four-toed horse, being called a transition to something else, but what that something else was no one knows. The same with this so-called "primitive whale." It is, after all, a whale. A whale is a whale is a whale. Why then conclude that it is related to the hippo? In order for that to be proved, we would need a transitional form leading from the hippo to the whale-- a transitional form that is neither hippo nor whale. Has any such ever been discovered? I mean an animal that does not fit neatly into one of the recognizable catagories?





Yes, that is exactly what Darwin complained of back in the 1840s and 50s. He said in Origin of Species that he fully expected that the fossil record, when more thoroughly examined, would eventually reveal many transitional forms. However, these have still not been discovered, despite the fact that scientists have been looking diligently for them for over 170 years. I should think they would have been found by now if they ever did exist. It just seems strange to me that out of all the billions and billions of fossils, not a single instance can be singled out as having proven to be an indisputable, clear transition from one major group, or phylum, to another. There are, I know, lots of examples of imaginary transitions, such as an artist's concept of what one might have looked like, for instance the various so-called transitions from lower forms of life to human beings, etc.






I don't doubt that what you say here is true, but what I have reference to is the eye's extreme complexity and how highly unlikely it seems that it would have evolved by pure chance. Darwin could not possibly have understood the human eye's true complexity, yet it seemed complex enough even in his relative ignorance concerning the eye's design that it made him feel as if he was proposing an absurdity to consider natural selection as the way in which the eye came into existence. How much more daunting it would certainly then seem to him if he were more knowledgeable of the human eye today.

You are, of course, correct to observe that we do not need all of a modern eye in order for it to be useful. In fact, Darwin discusses this very thing in Chapter VI, "Difficulties With the Theory." The problem is that I cannot conceive of either the fully developed human eye or the eagle eye coming about because of mutations or by pure chance. It is not a question of how much of the eye is necessary for perfect vision, or, as you say, "to be useful." It is a question, rather, of how the complete human eye came into existence by pure chance and without any evidence, as far as human beings are concerned, of its ever having been less than the fully developed, useful eye of today.

Do we, in any case, have firm evidence from the fossil record or from ancient skulls that humans or direct ancestors of humans ever had anything except two fully developed eyes? There is no evidence, is there, that the eye evolved by slow mutations? If not, it seems useless to discuss the idea that we don't need all of the modern eye in order for it to be useful.






I apologize for editing the last part of your responses, but tomorrow I'll be back to complete my answers to them the best that I can. Thank you.

It is quite true creationists can't explain everything about the fossil record. Yet they are not in the situation that evolutionists are when faced with the fact that out of billions and billions of fossils, and out of the many thousands of different kinds of animals, evolutionists cannot produce a single example of an indisputable, clear transition between one major group and another. For instance, not a single indisputable, multicellular fossil has ever been found in precambrian rocks. Where are the single cell ancestors of the complex life forms? As another instance, there is no documented evidence from the fossil record that vertebrates were derived from invertebrates. It is an assumption made, and one for which there is no proof.

Just two quick comments, at the risk of being considered an apologist for evolution. I assume that you are interested (including in the context of creationism evangelism) in strengthening the logic and clarity of your points?

The 'monkeys typing Shakespeare' example is flawed because it is teleological: we already know what the complete and correct typed works of Shakespeare would look like. The monkeys, whether they knew it or not, would be working toward a specific and definite end goal in such an experiment. Evolution, as it is understand by virtually all evolutionists, is not teleological, it has no predetermined end point. Rather, it is the on-going process of adapting to changes in the evironment. We are already starting to see siginificant adaptations to climate change, for example, but climate change is a continuous phenomenon on this planet, so we will continue to see change. In the same way, arguments about the probability of creating this exact universe through evolutionary processes are often flawed because they are teleological; they assume that this exact universe was the goal.

Second point is that bevin's example about the coins was aimed at introducing the principle of selection. Your points (John317) have been phrased in terms of the *random* chance combinations of molecules, but the whole point of evolutionary theory is that its process are *not* random, but are selected for in terms of survival. There are suggested possible mechanisms for the development of simple amino acids both in solution and on clay matrices, in ways that would 'select' for certain types. Simple amino acids can build proteins, and proteins cells. What is a virus - life or non-life?

Anyway, I'm not arguing a position here, I'm trying to 'sharpen steel' by moving beyond misunderstandings of evolution to discuss substantive issues.

Beryl said: " The Bible has already told us how the world was created the first time around (in 6 literal days), and so it is taken for granted that once again "by the word of God" it will be a literal creation within the same period of time. You cannot have evolution and the bible together -- they don't mix."


olger said "Amen"