This concise pamphlet provides answers to common objections to evolution, such as: If humans came from apes, why aren’t apes evolving into humans?; Only an intelligent designer could have made something as complex as an eye; The second law of thermo-dynamics proves that evolution is impossible; Evolution can’t account for morality; and more…
TAGS: creationism, Darwin, evolution and/or creationism, fossil record, free download, Intelligent Design
This article was published on December 30, 2010.
I tend to agree with Mr. Mcnab. I am no scientist, but it seems to me that whatever the most favorable environment for a trilobite is could become isolated and preserved until a humanoid stepped into it. Viola’ fossil evidence for both. It doesn’t negate natural selection, tho.
2 and 8 need clarification. Most people seem to think that there are too many gaps in the HUMAN fossil record to give evolution much credit. Even Darwin supposedly said this. With all the fakes and mistakes taken out, there are still only a few transitional forms of man left. It seems like there should be more. Why aren’t there more? Item 2 dodges that issue by including ALL fossils, and 8 avoids it by only stating that we remove fakes and mistakes. You need to show what’s left and why that is enough in scientific opinion.
There are three interesting youtube videos dealing with intelligent design here:
http://www.faithflip.com
These videos were produced by a former fundamentalist pastor who understands the evangelical perspective and gently debunks the creation myth without being overtly offensively.
Just a snapshot of the process I use to keep a truly open and skepticle mind. Directed towards anybody that chooses to contemplate this.
Thanks for your clarification, Dewey. I’m with you right up to “having a truly open mind means that when you decide toout and out reject something, you must also prove a truth”. What do you mean by this?
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my question. I would like you to know that the first four sentences in my comment were in no way directed towards your insightfull and skeptical concern. An error of composition on my part. With that said, I think the combination of environment {ancient shallow sea beds} and the composition {exoskeleton} of the trilobite obviously lends itself to be preserved and explains the plethora of fossil specimens. I should also point out the possible diet of these scavengers. Iam assuming we are talking about marine mammals fossilising in situ with the aformentioned environment. I find the odds of this highley unlikely.
Also Iam of the understanding that the chronology of the dare I say, genesis of species, is of the utmost importance to the theory of evolution.
To me, having a truly open mind means, that when you decide to out and out reject something, you must also prove a truth.
Thank you for your attention, I await your retort.
Dewey Diligence, you misread my post (but perhaps I was unclear). I am advocating the expunging of a false statement. I believe that the statement “If you can find fossil mammals in the same geological strata as trilobites then evolution would be falsified” is FALSE.
The reason I think that it is false is that evolutionary theory does not insist that trilobites must be extince before mammals evolved. It appears to be an empirical fact that this is how things happened, but it is not a logical consequence of evolution.
Since the sequence “trilobites become extinct before mammals appear” is not a consequence of evolutionary theory, then the statement “If you can find fossil mammals in the same geological strata as trilobites thenevolution would be falsified” is false.
It is for this reason that I do not believe that a document dedicated to debunking “10 Myths about Evolution” should contain the statement.
Perhaps you should consider retracting your comment, Dewey.
Myth #1 “We come not from apes but from
a common ancestor that was
neither ape nor human that lived
millions of years in the past”
Myth #2 “and in
human evolution there are at least a dozen intermediate fossil stages since hominids
branched off from the great apes six million years ago”.
I guess I’ve missed something.
No harm meant, just a little skepticism.
I thought this was a site for skeptics. Surprise, surprise, since when do skeptics not present all information, either for or against a particular theory? This is the only way to make an informed conclusion. Please do not turn skepticism into religion, it is the last bastion of free thought. I would like to know about this falsehood, John Macnab. I wonder why you felt so inclined to omit this information.
Thank you Trevor. I agree with your criticism of young earth creationism. It predicts all kinds of things that we don’t see, as you note.
My concern is that this otherwise excellent pamphlet contains a falsehood. Fortunately, no major argument relies on the falsehood, but I’d like to see it expunged nonetheless.
Myth #7 contains the sentence “If you can find fossil mammals in the same geological strata as trilobites then
evolution would be falsified. No one has ever found such contradictory data.” This seems to me to be mistaken.
Evolution (in its various theoretical incarnations) predicts a wide array of outcomes in an enormously wide array of scenarios. Should we find fossil mammals and trilobites together it would indicate at most that our chronology of species arrival on earth is flat-out wrong. I can see no evolutionary reason to assert that trilobites HAD to be extinct before mammals arrived. What we do have is evidence to suggest that that is what, in fact, happened. But the two are causally separable.
John, I think you are partially right. Horseshoe crabs can likely be found in strata that would include a wide variety of animals since they seem to have been around so long.
But the point of this myth is that young earth creationists believe ALL those animals now extict at one point, and quite recently, lived at the exact same time and died in the Noachian flood which would have jumbled them all together. So in young earth creationism it should be rare to find a group of only trilobites and only mammals. But we NEVER find tilobites AND mammoths AND dinosaurs together, thus the myth.
If there were anything scientific to creationism it would predict that we find these wide ranging types of animals together on a regular basis.
All seems to be summed up in a far more engaging manner than the PDF..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DXl68NF_uI