mods, i admit, i need your help here. i can't make sense of this. in
this thread, as we hurtle increasingly further off-topic, faith suggests the old creationist canard, that before the fall there were no animals that ate meat. while i fail to see the biblical basis for this, i suppose this should be a science thread, due to sheer inanity and absurdity of the claims, in ignorance and irreverence of scientific, well, anything. faith, for instance, writes:
faith writes:
Things changed after the Fall. Animals became meat-eaters after the Fall. They EVOLVED into the toothy types. Then those extreme types died out IN THE FLOOD.
There are no plant-eating lion fossils because plant-eating lions, if they ever existed, would not have survived until the Flood but would have died out/evolved into meat eaters, and fossilization is a rare event. Takes something like a humongous Flood to preserve so many as we see today.
and in another posts suggests an extremely speedy version of evolution:
faith writes:
I picture a gradual change from plant-eating types of all kinds of animals to meat-eating types over a few hundred years. Not millions of years.
adding,
faith writes:
What was preserved on the ark was a representative of each kind. An elephant but not necessariy a mammoth. A cat or a number of cats -- it depends on what a Kind is -- but not the sabre-toothed.
here is my reply, which i am moving from the other thread:
quote:
It hangs together. Think about it.
as an art student, i've seen a lot of stuff hang together. in galleries, even. sometimes, the stuff that sticks to the wall the best...
A cat or a number of cats -- it depends on what a Kind is -- but not the sabre-toothed.
i really, honestly do not know where to begin with this. maybe you should start another thread. because this sort of idea, well, simple argued something like this. it requires gross ignorance and distortion of biology, geology, paleontology, genetics, and evolution itself. in fact, it's far, far more radical than anything evolution has ever claimed -- why are creationists suddenly willing to support evolution to prop up ad-hoc misinterpretations of scripture?
let's start with this. a cat is a mammal. all mammals have more than one kind of tooth, and that includes canines. this is actually part of the definition of a mammal, and we have very few animals with more than one kind of tooth that are not mammals. (dimetrodon, for instance, which appears to basally related to mammals.)
cats are hunting and killing machines. the fastest land animal on the planet is a cat, and it uses its anatomy like a spring, so it can catch and eat just about anything it wants. cats have claws that remain razor sharp by means of shedding their outter sheaths. cats are slim, and muscular, and strong, and fast. cats are designed to kill, not stand around eating grass. one needs only look at a cat and a cow to see the difference in builds between an animal that does well eating grass, and an animal that does well eating other animals.
in other words, a cat that is not designed to eat meat would be so fundamentally different from a lion that we would not even call it a cat. it wouldn't look like a cat, or act like a cat. it wouldn't BE a cat. we could draw more similarities between it and a cow, or even a duck-billed dinosaur than we could between it and a cat.
i can't really explain this to you better, because i'm at a complete loss here. this is downright stupifying. maybe i have a bit of a different perspective, because i have cats that we have never been able to train to NOT eat the birds, mice, and lizards in our yard.
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