quote:
Fascinating response, I assume your view is not too popular with your fellow evolutionists ?
Actually, that "humans came from apes" (as we know apes today) is a creationist misconception of evolution. Present-day apes and present-day humans evolved from the same ancestors - *both* have diverged. I like how
TalkOrigins puts it, in response to someone asking "If we are decended from apes, why are there still apes around?":
" The question is rather like asking, "If many Americans and Australians are descended from Europeans, why are there still Europeans around?" "
quote:
What is that common ancestor ?
Pick your "ape". Family trees don't all branch off at one point. Organisms are constantly having genetic deviation, but are kept together by niche. When niches diverge, the species becomes reproductively isolated, and cladogenesis (the splitting of a species) occurs. Most splits die out in the long run, but a few become quite successful, and diverge many times further. The common ancestor between ourselves and
(insert "ape" here) is the point where that particular split occurred. The real challenge is to get a fossil species along the exact lineage, and not a sister species (although you can still see the evolutionary pathway even if you end up with sister species fossils at a given point)
quote:
Also, I am surprised at the lack of response to your reply by other Darwinists. What is your response when they vehemently disagree with what you said in the reply I am responding to ?
We agree with him. We didn't evolve from apes. We evolved from their ancestors.
quote:
The problem I have with evolution is that it just doesn't make sense. I see brilliant scientists coming up with every explanation of the bones and fossils that they unearth, which said explanations ring hollow.
I would encourage you to take a course to learn the basics of paleontology. Just like in forensics you can learn a lot from a crime scene based on "incidentals", you can learn an awful lot from a bone.
For example, we can tell which of our ancestors walked upright, which were quadropeds, and which were in-between. I'm sure you just assume that it's pure speculation when you hear it, right? Again, there's that knowledge gap: for a bipedal species, the sockets for the leg bones will need to be putting their pressure parallel to the spine, while for a quadroped they need to apply pressure perpendicular. Thus, you can look at the sockets to see where pressure is being applied and how they are free to rotate, and determine how the animal typically walked.
There are literally thousands of different things you can determine by looking at a well-preserved skeleton. This is where "study" comes in, and why it takes years of college and years in the field to become a competent paleontologist.
quote:
It just seems like they will conclude anything and everything but God.
You do realize, I assume, that the original paleontologists were creationists? As the fossil record was uncovered, however, there were some significant concerns. Species, no matter where in the world you looked, were always sorted into layers. The sorting was completely irrelevant to size and shape. Why, for example, would you always find grasses above trilobytes? It made no sense. So, a theory was developed.
Evolution, right?
No. "Multiple creations".
They were so set on seing the work of God in the world that they proposed a theory that was pretty much accepted, that God had actually made "multiple creations", and then destroyed all of creation and made new versions that looked similar to older versions.
However, they kept having to increase the number of creations over and over, and the graduations between species kept getting smoother. Eventually, it was only a matter of time before evolution was formalized and accepted.
quote:
They can DEDUCE like crazy except the one deducement that God requires which is that what is made was deliberately made so that one could deduce that a Creator made it. {Romans 1:20}
Unfortunately, unless God is a prankster, all of the scientific fields keep running into data that contradicts that.
Why, Willowtree, did God create only isotopes on earth that have half-lives longer than a few hundred million years (i.e., will have dissapeared by 4.5 billion years) or are part of a decay sequence? What reason would he have to do that? We can create, and see created elsewhere in the universe, these "missing" isotopes. But they're all gone here.
Why would God sort the fossils as such, so as to force scientists into at first accepting multiple creations, and then finally evolution?
Why would he match up radioisotope dating - even if you believe that they're all in error (despite confirming each other) - to dates that confirm the "missing isotopes"? In fact, due to radioisotopic dating, Geologists were arguing that the Earth was old even when physicists were insisting that it was impossible. The sun, they said, could not be billions of years old. Why? They didn't know about fusion at the time, so the model that they proposed for how the sun worked involved only gravitational collapse (which powers young stars). And yet, the geologists were completely convinced, based on radioisotope dating, that the earth was billions of years old, despite another branch of science stating otherwise. Then, fusion was discovered, and yet another piece of evidence came into play: the sun matches up exactly in composition with how it would be if it had been undergoing fusion for 4 1/2 billion years.
Why did God create stars that are billions of light years away? I'm sure you're thinking, "How do we know they're that far away?" Here's
26 completely different methods, all of which just happen to confirm each other. Some have been in use since ancient times; some are more recent. Again, it's the reason why it takes years of college before you can understand just *why* scientists are so convinced as to the realities of the universe: everything fits.
Why are there no stars with contents that indicate that they'd be older than 14 1/2 billion years? It's quite possible - indeed, many observed stars could keep burning for tens of billions of years more. But none are older than this - there's a sharp cutoff. Why?
Yes, God could have created light en-route from stars that are billions of light years away, and made all stars look as if they're a range of ages from zero to 14 1/2 billion light years old. God could have sorted fossils in the ground from no conceivable method, and rigged all of the minerals in the planet to give false dates. He could have stripped the planet of all isotopes that would decay completely on a multi-billion year old earth, just to finish off the gag.
But why? Is God a prankster?
------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."
™ Version 4.2