by Chap 53 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
In a book called Can Christianity Be Proven? Beyond Reasonable Doubt! by Robert J. Morgan, the author states that Josephus described Jesus as a wise man that was crucified and
"on the third day he appeared to them restored to life...and the sect of Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared."
This is generally considered to be a forgery.
Also there is evidence that all living people decended recently from one man and one woman.
No there isn't.
rem
A while ago, I think Abaddon and others asked for secular accounts for Christ's resurrection in response to something I wrote. I believe I stated that if Jesus didn't rise from the dead, everything else in christianity would be moot.
That was part of the original post of this thread. I will try to stick to biblical or non biblical evidence that Jesus Christ in fact rose from the dead.
Can we agree that it would be easier for a person to rise from the dead than to create life if in fact the same person that created life rose from the dead? There seems to be people with the belief that the resurrection could not have happened because it is a supernatural event. Could we also say that the universe and everything in it got here by a supernatural event? I think that the resurrection of a body that has been dead for three days is less extraordinary than the beginnings of this universe. Christianity supposes that the creator of the universe dwelt in a being that he created. Is this plausible? I think so. If the creator can create life, why would it be hard for him to restore a life that already was? Have I established that the resurrection of a life is possible?
Great minds think alike, eh Brad? :-)
Chap said:
: When there have been disagreements between secular history and biblical history, when there has been conclusive archaeological evidence, it has come down on the side of the Bible every single time.
Taking this tack doesn't change a thing. What do bible believers accept as conclusive archaeological evidence? Only that which confirms their already-held notions. So all you've done is repeat your initial meaningless tautology.
Sorry, Faraon, I will try to mend my ways.
Hooberus, I see you're still at it -- posting things you cannot back up and running away when challenged. Note that this is a prophecy for purposes of this thread.
: Alan, proposed dates for the flood range from 4,500 to 7,500 years ago.
Only when you ignore the clear biblical proof that Adam was created somewhere between 4004 and 4026 B.C.
More seriously, I've read plenty of justifications from Fundamentalists like Henry Morris that attempt to stretch out the "biblical timetables" that many literalists, including the JWs, have set forth. In every case it's a matter of trying to accomodate fairly clear biblical statements to evidence that proves "it just ain't so". If you ignore these statements, and try to figure ways around them as Morris and others do, you've defeated your notion of an inspired Bible that's supposed to be easy enough to understand that the ordinary, unlettered Christian has no need of high-powered scholars such as Morris.
Of course, all of this pales by comparison with the simple fact that there has not been an earthwide flood any time in the past few hundred million years.
: Also Egypt is listed in the Bible as being one of the earliest post-flood civilizations. Hense standard Egyptian chronology (even if correct)does not overturn the Biblical flood.
Again, only if you discount what the Bible actually says.
:: The creation account of man: The Bible claims that Adam and Eve were the first humans and were created some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago according to various Fundamentalists.
: Yes they do, and the 10,000 year date would overturn your Egyptian Chronology arguments.
Note that I don't accept the 10,000 year figure. If you read a careful explanation for such a figure in, say, Whitcomb and Morris' The Genesis Flood, you can see how much straw pulling they do to get this high figure. Of course, not even they are particularly convinced of it, but advance it only to get around certain rather obvious problems.
: Also there is evidence that all living people decended recently from one man and one woman.
Ah, here you're engaging in the classic fuzzy statement so beloved by Watchtower writers. You state something in a fuzzy enough manner that you, and the dumber of your readers, don't have to think much about it. Not only that, your statement is so wrong that it's obvious you have no idea what you're talking about. So here are some facts:
You're probably talking about the "mitochondrial Eve" theory. According to this theory, somewhere around 250,000 years ago, give or take about 75,000 years, there lived a woman from whom everyone living on earth today derives their mitochrondrial genes through lines of female descent. This in no sense says, or even implies, that that woman was the only woman alive at that time. It only says that all other lines of descent via the mitochrondrial genetic pathway have died out. However, there are many problems with this theory, which scientists are still arguing about. Nevertheless, it is a statistical certainty that there will always be a "mitochondrial Eve" of some sort. Read some material by Richard Dawkins for details. Biologists have also done studies on human descent through male genes, but because these genes are mixed every generation due to the nature of sexual reproduction, the theory is quite inconclusive. A recent discovery, which more or less competes with the above two, is that about 75,000 years ago a huge explosion of the volcano Toba in Indonesia precipitated a climatic crisis which resulted in a major intensification of the ongoing ice age conditions, which killed off all but perhaps a couple thousand humans. This is an obvious population bottleneck which would also account for a kind of "mitochondrial Eve" notion, but is mutually exclusive with the original ME theory.
So Hooberus, your claim that there is evidence that all living people decended recently from one man and one woman is wrong on a variety of counts: all of the evidence presented talks about time scales from 75,000 to 325,000 years, which if anything, disproves the Adam and Eve story, and the evidence for the timescale of descent through the male is so scanty as to be useless.
:: Paleontology proves that mankind (of the Homo sapiens variety) has existed for more than 100,000 years, and that other species of recognizable humans have been around for the better part of a million years, and that earlier species such as Homo erectus (now Homo ergaster) have been around for twice that long.
: Paleontology is full of evolutionary assumptions, and the dating methods are also.
Such a sparkling disproof of the geological record is difficult to argue with. Nevertheless, I'll tackle it.
The fossil record has nothing to do with "evolutionary assumptions", nor does the geological timescale. For purposes of classification and description of evolutionary relationships, paleontology certainly generally assumes that evolution has occurred, but that assumption does not extend to the roots of paleontology. Indeed, paleontologists usually assume evolution for everyday purposes simply because a long history of interpretation based on it works quite well in explaining the basic observations from the fossil record. What sort of observations?
Boiling them all down: that plants and animals occur in the fossil record in a sensible sequence that can be dated via reliable methods such as radioisotopes.
Absolute dating methods are ultimately based on the physics of radioactive materials. This has nothing whatsoever to do with "evolutionary assumptions". Christian paleontologists in the early 19th century gradually established a sequence of sedimentary rocks in Britain and parts of Europe. They observed that certain types of rocks always occurred in a certain sequence, from bottom to top, and that these rocks always contained certain types of fossils. Therefore they concluded that certain fossils could be used to establish relative ages of sedimentary rocks -- the older ones were below the younger, and when they found certain fossils they could be fairly certain that other indicators would be consistent and indicate the place in the overall sequence. They then assumed that when parts of the sequence were missing because of weathering or whatever, the parts they found were consistent with the whole picture. They had no idea of the absolute age of any of these sequences. Absolute age was not established until radioisotope dating came on line in the 1940s. Such dating has proved to be quite reliable when done properly.
Other dating methods are less precise than radioisotope dating, but certainly can give an indication of age like "in the ballpark of a few thousand years ago" or "much older than a few thousand years". And the latter is all that is needed to thoroughly disprove the "biblical timetable" no matter what Fundamentalist assumptions are used to arrive at it.
For example, in 1984 there was discovered near Lake Turkana in Kenya the partial skeleton of a Homo erectus boy of about 10-12 years of age. It was buried in sediments that, via a variety of evidences, are obviously much older than 4,500 to 10,000 years. You can find tons of information on this by going to any search engine and typing the words homo, erectus and boy. The first one that Google came up with for me was this: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/15000.html . A number of websites have pictures of the skull of this boy. It is obviously not that of a modern human, being quite outside the range of skull shapes and brain capacities of any modern human. But the rest of the skeleton is quite human. How do young-earth creationists explain evidence like this? Answer: they don't. They either ignore it, or come up with amazingly stupid claims that don't address the reality of what was found.
:: The creation account generally: The Bible sets forth the creation of various plant and animal types in a specific order. This order is not observed in the paleontological record.
: Most creationists hold that the fossil record was laid down by the flood not during creation, hense the order in the fossil record need not conform to the creation sequence in the Bible. Don't you know what creationists actually believe about these things?
Of course I know what they believe. So-called "flood geology" is a most ridiculous notion. To claim that the fossil sequence is such as it is because some animals were smarter than others and so knew to run for higher ground is the height of stupidity.
Hooberus, you're obviously a reasonably bright fellow. Please don't tell me that you actually put stock in this ridiculous notion! If you do, I'll have to disfellowship you from the human race for conduct unbecoming a human.
AlanF
Hooberus, I see you're still at it -- posting things you cannot back up and running away when challenged. Note that this is a prophecy for purposes of this thread.
Actually Alan, I can only recall one instance in which I deliberately declined to continue an origins discussion with you on another thread. This was not due to the fact that I felt that your arguments were not answerable, but due to other reasons.
Note that I don't accept the 10,000 year figure. If you read a careful explanation for such a figure in, say, Whitcomb and Morris' The Genesis Flood, you can see how much straw pulling they do to get this high figure. Of course, not even they are particularly convinced of it, but advance it only to get around certain rather obvious problems.
High figures (like 5,000 years before Abraham) are given as an outside limit in the book The Genesis Flood. It would not take much of an extension to accomidate Egyptian chronology and the Biblical flood. For example if the flood occurred in 4500 BC, then there is more than enough time to accomidate Egyptian dates. It could also be that the Egyptian chronologies are not strictly accurate, which would allow for an even more recent flood date. For example one could propose a flood date of 3,000BC and a pyramid date of 2,000 BC. However even if one accepts standard Egyptian chronology there really is no large conflict with a recent Biblical flood.
: Also there is evidence that all living people decended recently from one man and one woman.
Ah, here you're engaging in the classic fuzzy statement so beloved by Watchtower writers. You state something in a fuzzy enough manner that you, and the dumber of your readers, don't have to think much about it. Not only that, your statement is so wrong that it's obvious you have no idea what you're talking about. So here are some facts:
You're probably talking about the "mitochondrial Eve" theory. According to this theory, somewhere around 250,000 years ago, give or take about 75,000 years, there lived a woman from whom everyone living on earth today derives their mitochrondrial genes through lines of female descent. This in no sense says, or even implies, that that woman was the only woman alive at that time. It only says that all other lines of descent via the mitochrondrial genetic pathway have died out. However, there are many problems with this theory, which scientists are still arguing about. Nevertheless, it is a statistical certainty that there will always be a "mitochondrial Eve" of some sort. Read some material by Richard Dawkins for details. Biologists have also done studies on human descent through male genes, but because these genes are mixed every generation due to the nature of sexual reproduction, the theory is quite inconclusive. A recent discovery, which more or less competes with the above two, is that about 75,000 years ago a huge explosion of the volcano Toba in Indonesia precipitated a climatic crisis which resulted in a major intensification of the ongoing ice age conditions, which killed off all but perhaps a couple thousand humans. This is an obvious population bottleneck which would also account for a kind of "mitochondrial Eve" notion, but is mutually exclusive with the original ME theory.
So Hooberus, your claim that there is evidence that all living people decended recently from one man and one woman is wrong on a variety of counts: all of the evidence presented talks about time scales from 75,000 to 325,000 years, which if anything, disproves the Adam and Eve story, and the evidence for the timescale of descent through the male is so scanty as to be useless.
The date of 200,000 plus years for mitochondrial eve is based on the evolutionary assumption that humans and apes shraed a common ancestor 4 plus million years ago! Hense it is faulty reasoning to use a date based on humans and apes sharing a common ancestor to attempt to disprove a Biblical chronology in which humans were created separately.
The following quote is taken from an icr arcticle:
http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-229.htm
"It is also necessary for the evolutionist to determine the rate of mutational changes in the DNA if these mutational changes are to be used as a "molecular clock." Since there is nothing in the nuclear DNA or the mtDNA molecules to indicate how often they mutate, we might also ask how the evolutionist calibrates his "molecular clock." Sarich, one of the pioneers of the molecular-clock concept, began by calculating the mutation rates of various species ". . . whose divergence [evolution] could be reliably dated from fossils."[7] He then applied that calibration to the chimpanzee-human split, dating that split at from five to seven million years ago. Using Sarich's mutation calibrations, Wilson and Cann applied them to their mtDNA studies, comparing ". . . the ratio of mitochondrial DNA divergence among humans to that between humans and chimpanzees."[8] By this method, they arrived at a date of approximately 200,000 years ago for African Eve. Hence, an evolutionary timescale obtained from an evolutionary interpretation of fossils was superimposed upon the DNA molecules. Once again, the circularity is obvious. The alleged evidence for evolution from the DNA molecules is not an independent confirmation of evolution but is, instead, based upon an evolutionary interpretation of fossils as its starting point."
The following taken from the book Refuting Evolution by Jonathan Sarfati Eight printing November 1999, gives evidence that the date for eve may be much more recent than the figures which assume evolution.
"Evolutionists believed they had clear proof against the biblical account, because "Mitochondrial Eve" supposedly lived 200,000 years ago. However, recent evidence shows that mitochondrial DNA mutates far faster than previously thought. (24) If this new evidence is applied to "Mitochondrial Eve," it indicates that she would have lived only 6,000-6,500 years ago. (25) Of course, this is perfectly consistent with the biblically indicated age of the "mother of all living" (Gen. 3:20), (26) but an enigma for evolution/long age beliefs. Interestingly, there is a parallel account with males: evidence from the Y-chromosome is consistent with all people being descended from a single man. (27) The data is also consistent with a recent date for this "Y-chromosome Adam." (28)"
24. T.J. Parsons et al., "A High Observed Substitution Rate in the Human Mitochondrial DNA Control Region," Nature Genetics, 15:363-368, 1997.
25. L. Loewe and S. Scherer, "Mitochondrial Eve: The Plot Thickens," Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 12(11):422-423, 1997; A. Gibbons, "Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock," Science, 279(5347):28-29, 1998.
26. C. Wieland, "A Shrinking Date for 'Eve,' " CEN Technicl Journal, 12(1):1-3, 1998.
27. R.L. Dorit, Hiroshi Akashi, and W. Gilbert, "Absence of Polymorphism at the ZFY Locus on the Human Y-Chromosome," Science,268(5214):1183-85, May 26,1995; perspective in the same issue by S. Paabo, "The Y-Chromosome and the Origin of All of Us (Men)," p. 1141-1142.
28. D.J. Batten, "Y-Chromosome Adam?" CEN Technical Journal, 9(2):139-140, 1995.
I have also read somewhere that scholars know that Josephus writings have been tampered with by later Christian theologizes. When I find the quote or reference material I will post it.
Will
Alan F said:
"Such a sparkling disproof of the geological record is difficult to argue with. Nevertheless, I'll tackle it.
The fossil record has nothing to do with "evolutionary assumptions", nor does the geological timescale. For purposes of classification and description of evolutionary relationships, paleontology certainly generally assumes that evolution has occurred, but that assumption does not extend to the roots of paleontology. Indeed, paleontologists usually assume evolution for everyday purposes simply because a long history of interpretation based on it works quite well in explaining the basic observations from the fossil record. What sort of observations?
Boiling them all down: that plants and animals occur in the fossil record in a sensible sequence that can be dated via reliable methods such as radioisotopes.
Absolute dating methods are ultimately based on the physics of radioactive materials. This has nothing whatsoever to do with "evolutionary assumptions". Christian paleontologists in the early 19th century gradually established a sequence of sedimentary rocks in Britain and parts of Europe. They observed that certain types of rocks always occurred in a certain sequence, from bottom to top, and that these rocks always contained certain types of fossils. Therefore they concluded that certain fossils could be used to establish relative ages of sedimentary rocks -- the older ones were below the younger, and when they found certain fossils they could be fairly certain that other indicators would be consistent and indicate the place in the overall sequence. They then assumed that when parts of the sequence were missing because of weathering or whatever, the parts they found were consistent with the whole picture. They had no idea of the absolute age of any of these sequences. Absolute age was not established until radioisotope dating came on line in the 1940s. Such dating has proved to be quite reliable when done properly."
While some fossils are generally found above other groups of fossils, There are more than enough instances of missing systems with no evidence of erosion to call into question the whole concept of geologic ages.
http://www.trueorigins.org/geocolumn.asp
Alan F said: The creation account generally: The Bible sets forth the creation of various plant and animal types in a specific order. This order is not observed in the paleontological record.
Hooberus replied: Most creationists hold that the fossil record was laid down by the flood not during creation, hense the order in the fossil record need not conform to the creation sequence in the Bible. Don't you know what creationists actually believe about these things?
Alan F then said: Of course I know what they believe. So-called "flood geology" is a most ridiculous notion. To claim that the fossil sequence is such as it is because some animals were smarter than others and so knew to run for higher ground is the height of stupidity.
If you know what they believe then why did you use the argument "The creation account generally: The Bible sets forth the creation of various plant and animal types in a specific order. This order is not observed in the paleontological record." ?
Since a few progressive creationists believe that the fossil record was laid down during periods of creation I assume this is what you were referring to. However most main-line creationist organizations do not hold to this. Several of the evolutionary proponets here have used this faulty argument here and it makes me wonder how much they really know about the creation model. But since you are more familiar with some of the geological/flood issues than they are I will assume that your comments referred to progressive creationism.
Alan F said: "To claim that the fossil sequence is such as it is because some animals were smarter than others and so knew to run for higher ground is the height of stupidity."
Mobility is only one of many diffferent mechanisms proposed to explan the limited order found in fossils.
Hooberus,
You sadden me. Such an intelligent person trapped in a flat-earth type of mythology. There are some people who are just hoplessly lost to irrational beliefs no matter what the evidence shows. I really try to still hold out hope for you, though.
rem
Alan F said:For example, in 1984 there was discovered near Lake Turkana in Kenya the partial skeleton of a Homo erectus boy of about 10-12 years of age. It was buried in sediments that, via a variety of evidences, are obviously much older than 4,500 to 10,000 years. You can find tons of information on this by going to any search engine and typing the words homo, erectus and boy. The first one that Google came up with for me was this: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/15000.html . A number of websites have pictures of the skull of this boy. It is obviously not that of a modern human, being quite outside the range of skull shapes and brain capacities of any modern human. But the rest of the skeleton is quite human. How do young-earth creationists explain evidence like this? Answer: they don't. They either ignore it, or come up with amazingly stupid claims that don't address the reality of what was found.
Turkana boy is discussed in Gish's book Evolution: The fossils Still Say No!
I've read some of the information on this and other homo erectus fossils from the talk-origin site. The site misrepresents what Gish's book actually says on homo-erectus.
:: Hooberus, I see you're still at it -- posting things you cannot back up and running away when challenged. Note that this is a prophecy for purposes of this thread.
: Actually Alan, I can only recall one instance in which I deliberately declined to continue an origins discussion with you on another thread. This was not due to the fact that I felt that your arguments were not answerable, but due to other reasons.
Then your memory leaves something to be desired, as apparently does your ability to fathom what constitutes an answer to a challenge. An answer does not consist merely of posting a link to some website. An answer may consist of your own discussion of the contents of a website, along with a link to it.
Furthermore, I was not only talking about threads in which I commented, but about the many posts of yours where you ran away from discussion with other posters.
My point is this: You don't have enough understanding of the material you sometimes quote, but most often simply list links to, to discuss it intelligently. You obviously simply find material that sort of supports your ideas, and post it with little or no understanding. See my challenge about your reference to Gish on the Turkana boy below for a typical example. In this, you're very much like Watchtower writers who comb the literature for anything that supports their silly notions, ignore anything they don't like, print only what seems to support them even when context indicates the opposite, and are too ignorant and/or cowardly to answer letters that challenge them.
:: Note that I don't accept the 10,000 year figure. If you read a careful explanation for such a figure in, say, Whitcomb and Morris' The Genesis Flood, you can see how much straw pulling they do to get this high figure. Of course, not even they are particularly convinced of it, but advance it only to get around certain rather obvious problems.
: High figures (like 5,000 years before Abraham) are given as an outside limit in the book The Genesis Flood.
That is essentially what I just said.
: It would not take much of an extension to accomidate Egyptian chronology and the Biblical flood.
Using the outside limit figures, yes, but not the figures they lean towards.
: For example if the flood occurred in 4500 BC, then there is more than enough time to accomidate Egyptian dates.
Yes, if you use that date. Unfortunately, a great many solid Fundamentalist bible commentators can show why the Bible does not allow for such dates.
: It could also be that the Egyptian chronologies are not strictly accurate, which would allow for an even more recent flood date.
You're forgetting the rotation of the Egyptian calendar with respect to the seasons. I think I mistated something in an earlier post about this, since I was writing off the cuff. According to the link http://webexhibits.org/calendars/timeline.html the earliest known date in the Egyptian calendar was its founding, 4236 B.C. In order to obtain enough observations to get a decent calendar, they must have begun observing at least a thousand years earlier. This extends the beginning of Egyptian civilization at least as far back as 5000 B.C.
: For example one could propose a flood date of 3,000BC and a pyramid date of 2,000 BC. However even if one accepts standard Egyptian chronology there really is no large conflict with a recent Biblical flood.
Only if you discount the many Bible commentators who literally interpret the given chronology.
::: Also there is evidence that all living people decended recently from one man and one woman.
:: ... You're probably talking about the "mitochondrial Eve" theory ...
:: So Hooberus, your claim that there is evidence that all living people decended recently from one man and one woman is wrong on a variety of counts: all of the evidence presented talks about time scales from 75,000 to 325,000 years, which if anything, disproves the Adam and Eve story, and the evidence for the timescale of descent through the male is so scanty as to be useless.
: The date of 200,000 plus years for mitochondrial eve is based on the evolutionary assumption that humans and apes shraed a common ancestor 4 plus million years ago! Hense it is faulty reasoning to use a date based on humans and apes sharing a common ancestor to attempt to disprove a Biblical chronology in which humans were created separately.
: The following quote is taken from an icr arcticle:
: http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-229.htm
: "It is also necessary for the evolutionist to determine the rate of mutational changes in the DNA if these mutational changes are to be used as a "molecular clock." Since there is nothing in the nuclear DNA or the mtDNA molecules to indicate how often they mutate, we might also ask how the evolutionist calibrates his "molecular clock." ..."
This is yet another fine example of how Young-Earth Creationists fail to complete the circle of logic. They fail to account for the fact that a great many hominid, hominoid and ape fossils form a sequence both in time and in structure, and that this sequence could not possibly exist in the time frame of the less than 6.000-10,000 years allowed by their creation notions. Radioisotope dating provides absolute dates for many of these fossils. All sorts of other evidence is perfectly consistent with these dates, including the simple fact that massive changes have occurred in the geology of the regions in which the fossils have been found, which changes had to have been after the claimed global flood of Noah! There is no way that YECs can explain any of this, and so they don't even try. They know very well that no dating methods at all support their young-earth ideas. Thus there is no logical reason to doubt the overall reliability of modern dating methods.
: The following taken from the book Refuting Evolution by Jonathan Sarfati Eight printing November 1999, gives evidence that the date for eve may be much more recent than the figures which assume evolution.
Sarfati is a crackpot and I will not waste space commenting on his nutty ideas. If you want to argue for him, go to it.
:: Such a sparkling disproof of the geological record is difficult to argue with. Nevertheless, I'll tackle it.
:: The fossil record has nothing to do with "evolutionary assumptions", nor does the geological timescale...
:: Boiling them all down: that plants and animals occur in the fossil record in a sensible sequence that can be dated via reliable methods such as radioisotopes...
: While some fossils are generally found above other groups of fossils, There are more than enough instances of missing systems with no evidence of erosion to call into question the whole concept of geologic ages.
Nonsense. Instead of doing as usual, why don't you take an example you think you can explain, and explain it to us?
: http://www.trueorigins.org/geocolumn.asp
Oh please! Woodmorappe is a thoroughgoing ass. His argument is a stereotypical strawman through and through. He claims that no single "geologic column" exists and that this is proof that evolution is wrong. His argument is a strawman for a simple reason: No scientist is claiming that a single "geologic column" exists. Indeed, solid geology shows that the surface of the earth has undergone massive changes via plate tectonics and erosion. Furthermore, every place on earth would be expected to have a different "geologic column" and each such "column" would be expected to be different since the history of each place on earth is different from every other. Why YECs refuse to think about such simple things is a reflection of their overall refusal to think.
:::: The creation account generally: The Bible sets forth the creation of various plant and animal types in a specific order. This order is not observed in the paleontological record.
::: Most creationists hold that the fossil record was laid down by the flood not during creation, hense the order in the fossil record need not conform to the creation sequence in the Bible. Don't you know what creationists actually believe about these things?
:: Of course I know what they believe. So-called "flood geology" is a most ridiculous notion. To claim that the fossil sequence is such as it is because some animals were smarter than others and so knew to run for higher ground is the height of stupidity.
: If you know what they believe then why did you use the argument "The creation account generally: The Bible sets forth the creation of various plant and animal types in a specific order. This order is not observed in the paleontological record." ?
Because a lot of creationists -- even sometimes those of the young-earth variety -- claim that the order of creation given in Genesis is consistent with the fossil record. The fact that so-called "flood geologists" often make inconsistent claims is not my problem.
: Since a few progressive creationists believe that the fossil record was laid down during periods of creation I assume this is what you were referring to.
Partly.
: However most main-line creationist organizations do not hold to this.
Indeed, YECs have styled themselves as "mainline" but the true mainline churches completely reject their nonsense. JWs make a similar claim, inferring that because they teach "the truth" given to them via their Governing Body, and no one else does, they're mainline Christians -- fact, the only Christians.
: Several of the evolutionary proponets here have used this faulty argument here and it makes me wonder how much they really know about the creation model.
There is no "creation model" besides "God did it".
:: To claim that the fossil sequence is such as it is because some animals were smarter than others and so knew to run for higher ground is the height of stupidity.
: Mobility is only one of many diffferent mechanisms proposed to explan the limited order found in fossils.
Yes, and all are at least as ridiculous as the mobility argument. Take, for example, how YECs try to explain away the existence of millions of annual varves in the Green River formation in Wyoming. These varve layers are usually only fractions of a millimeter thick, and are often continuous over thousands of square kilometers. Physics proves that in any real situation, the varves must have been formed very slowly, over the better part of a year for each one, since in any real situation turbulence would disturb the settling of the microscopic clay particles that comprise the varves. But YECs claim that these millions of layers formed in a few months during Noah's flood, necessitating the laying down of one new varve every two seconds or so. Do you know how YEC "researchers" attempt to "prove" that such layers can be formed so rapidly? They mix up sediments in a test tube and let them settle! Buy they fail to note the effect of turbulence, which would be there in massive amounts during Noah's flood. Turbulence prevents test tube results from applying over an area of thousands of square miles. So they deliberately ignore basic physics in order to support their nonsensical claims.
:: For example, in 1984 there was discovered near Lake Turkana in Kenya the partial skeleton of a Homo erectus boy of about 10-12 years of age. It was buried in sediments that, via a variety of evidences, are obviously much older than 4,500 to 10,000 years. You can find tons of information on this by going to any search engine and typing the words homo, erectus and boy. The first one that Google came up with for me was this: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/15000.html . A number of websites have pictures of the skull of this boy. It is obviously not that of a modern human, being quite outside the range of skull shapes and brain capacities of any modern human. But the rest of the skeleton is quite human. How do young-earth creationists explain evidence like this? Answer: they don't. They either ignore it, or come up with amazingly stupid claims that don't address the reality of what was found.
: Turkana boy is discussed in Gish's book Evolution: The fossils Still Say No!
Gish thoroughly misrepresents the evidence. I've read his books; I know firsthand how this man -- supposedly an honest Christian -- stoops to gross misrepresentations. He really ought to write for the Watchtower.
: I've read some of the information on this and other homo erectus fossils from the talk-origin site. The site misrepresents what Gish's book actually says on homo-erectus.
Nonsense. You have no idea what you're talking about. Here are several discussions:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/java15000.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/a_erectus.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/d2700.html
Can you point out even one thing that misrepresents Gish's claims? I don't think so. I don't think so because it's painfully obvious that you're incapable of reasoning for yourself on this subject.
AlanF
