Cryptozoology

I think this should be a lesson about trying to infer the existence of things from inanimate objects. Only presence can be inferred, not existence.

I guess what I'm saying is, the existence of Stonehenge would not be sufficient on its own for some alien biologist to infer the existence of the human species. We can infer that humans built it, because we have independant evidence for the existence of humans - i.e. we are them. Stonehenge is sufficient to infer the presence of humans near Salisbury, England, but not the existence of the whole human race in total. Similarly trying to infer the existence of god from what might be termed his "creation" is fallacious. However if we could independantly infer the existence of God through other means - direct observation, for instance - then the presence of God could be inferred from his creation.In short the only reason that we infer Mount Rushmore was carved by humans is because we know independantly that humans exist, and that we carve.[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 10-26-2003]

Funny then, that two things are true:1) People with cameras live all over the Earth, on every continent, and yet nobody has any pictures of dinosaurs.2) Scientists concluded that dinosaurs represented an extinct taxa of organisms before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species.How could scientists make a conclusion based on "evolutionary ideas" before those ideas had been published? I know that's your signature, and it seems like it's the 3rd time I've quoted this part of the Bible in as many days, but:

quote:

---

But I say to you ... whoever says, 'You fool!' shall be liable to the hell of fire. - Matthew 5:22

---

God sayz: Ease up on the name-calling, or else.

No, you're saying "You fool!", and therefore, liable to the fire of hell. The Bible says so. Hardly enough said. What does the presence of a modern species of Wollemi Pine have to do with the Bible being true? Does the Bible mention the Wollemi Pine? Well, that's certainly true. In fact evolution has been at work for about a billion years so far. Refreshing of you to admit this.I'm kidding. I know what you meant. Nonetheless, evolution as a scientific theory did not exist before Darwin, because he was he first to propose a natural mechanism for the process. Therefore scientists weren't making scientific conclusions from the theory at the time you implied they were, making you wrong.

Just a quibble, but it has been pointed out to me that there are no air or sea dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are strictly land species. There were, however, sea and air reptiles contemporary to the dinosaurs. Right, because they're edited or hoaxes. You're left with nothing that can be described as photographic evidence of dinosaurs, so my original statement is true - with the vast availiability of cameras - they're on cell phones now, for god's sake - why are there no pictures of dinosaurs if they're still alive? There is absolutely no speculation that the carcass in that picture belongs to anything but a basking shark in advanced stages of decomposition. Irrelevant; the claim was that the extinction of dinosaurs was posited not because of evidence that they are extinct but because of evolutionary bias. I pointed out that since it was concluded that dinosaurs were extinct long before evolution was formulated, that simply can't be true.If dinosaurs are not extinct, but have been living this whole time, why don't we ever find dinosaur fossils higher than cretaceous sediments?