Bodie Hodge, one of the dimmer bulbs flickering at Answers in Genesis, has an argument against the existence of transitional fossils. Basically, transitional fossils can’t exist, even if you show them to him, because the dates are all wrong. And he has a list of geological eras to prove it!
You see, our dates are all wrong. Everything we claim occurred between the beginning of the Cambrian (about 540 million years ago) and the beginning of the Pliocene (about 5 million years ago) actually occurred in a single Flood year which took place about 4400 years ago. Keep that in mind: everything listed as “Flood” took place in a brief period of 40 days and nights of rain, followed by about a year when the waters subsided and before Noah could beach his boat on Mt Ararat.
So when evolutionists say they found a transitional form between an ape and a human in Pliocene rock, creationists hardly flinch. Evolutionists are looking at the rock strata and the age of the earth incorrectly because humans were around long before that rock was ever laid down! Furthermore, humans existed when the Cambrian rock was laid down during the Flood. To go one more step, mankind had dominated the earth for over 1,600 years before the Cambrian rock was laid down!
When someone says that they found a transitional form between a dinosaur and a bird in the Paleocene, again, creationists hardly think twice. Both specimens died the same year in the same Flood and are not related. This is why finding feathers in the rock layers “before the dinosaurs” is not a problem for creationists. Nor is it a problem when we find theropod dinosaurs (which supposedly evolved into birds in the evolutionary story) that had eaten birds in lower Cretaceous rock.
Unfortunately, no traces of the organisms he claims had to have existed in the Precambrian — which includes all contemporary forms as well as a few others, like dragons — have ever been found, and the complex faunal assemblages that have been found in the “Flood” layers are surprisingly well-ordered by strata, with no significant mixing.
And yet this cataclysmic single year of the Flood was so energetically intense that essentially all of the geology we observe was laid down practically instantaneously in a geological eyeblink: tens of thousands of meters of sediments were generated, whole mountain ranges erupted upwards, great canyons were gouged out of the landscape, whole oceans surged into existence and then drained away, all life on earth was eradicated — and a single family of Bronze Age goat farmers rode out this spectacular, world-shaking catastrophe in a boat made of gopher wood and pitch, along with their livestock.
None of this is a problem for creationists
, because they can just invent a story in contradiction to all of the known facts and use that to prop up their other story that is in contradiction to all known facts.
“… before Noah could beach his boat on Mt Ararat.”
There are actually two errors there that unnecessarily give unearned ground to the creationists.
Firstly, the ancient Hebrews were not a sea faring tribe so the *ark* is described as a box with one window (an Ark is in fact a chest or box and not a boat). Secondly, Mt. Ararat did not exist as a name in those times, the fable explicitly says the mountains of Ararat, which is a region. Of course the idiot creationists have found the remains of the mythical ark on no less than 10 different places, many of which are nowhere near each other. In fact, I was surprised several decades ago when I discovered that loony Christians in South America (where I was at the time) where absolutely sure that the ark had actually grounded somewhere in South America.
Of course, the rest of your statements still stand. Like our current orange buffoon Liar In Chief in the White House, creationists simply invent additional lies to support their previous lies, ad infinitum.
PZ, you might as well argue with the kitchen table.
Do I have permission to pound on it?
Can you downvote a kitchen table? If not, then it might have less rational integrity than creationists.
@3, & 4. It appears to me, via some mysterious mechanism you won’t appreciate, or comprehend, transcendent of empiricism, etc, that you have met again, perhaps via Christmas, some people who were just as dull as fuck as they were before. I travelled to meet my long-lost sister, and met, by cruel chance, also her and mine old friends from 25 years ago. The oldie baldie, who is annoyingly good at piano, said, ‘Recently, eminent scientists have said that Darwin was wrong’. What do you do with that? I mean, when you are having a heart~felt reunion? Nothing suggested it would be a difficult battle. Unless settled by piano. The firewall is spectacular! How I could have embarrassed them. And how they would have been hurt. But how stupid they were yet, intelligent people, and what a stupid waste of humanity. How much better they could have been. Within, and then without, themselves.
“Evolutionists are looking at the rock strata and the age of the earth incorrectly because humans were around long before that rock was ever laid down!” Oh no they were not. Because their fossils are NEVER found within the the earlier rock layers in question.
It is evil to churn out this kind of anti-knowledge garbage. And they KNOW they are simply wrong and promoting fake ‘facts’ – they KNOW that rabbits will never be found in the pre-Cambrian (or dinosaur fossils in the VERY old Grand Canyon exposed rock layers). AiG and other young earth creationists were also in a panic over Homo naledi – they could not agree a single position on what they thought the species must be (some falsely claimed a mix of ape species and human bones) and AiG, despite the evidence, claimed ‘ape’.
Their approach to the subject is pretty well summed up in the Answers in Genesis Statement of Faith. It’s the equivalent of a fake news site’s disclaimer about being for “satirical purposes only.”
* F A C E P A L M *
* H E A D D E S K *
ow
How did AiG manage to let this pass, now that The Defeat of Flood Geology by Flood Geology is available?
Executive summary: All of the periods/epochs that Hodge lists as being have regions that include features like desiccation cracks (mudcracks), raindrop impressions, and other features like trackways and nests (after the animals that made them evolved, of course) that could not possibly have formed during a flood, because the processes that caused them required the area in question to completely dry out and be baked solid by the sun (so that they didn’t dissolve or lose shape when later waters covered them), such that the features listed could be preserved at all — and these problems have been noted by the geologists themselves!
There are other features listed as well, but the ones that require the sediments to be solidified with impressions in them are the most egregious.
I have many questions for creationists, but the first one is why God spent 20% of his effort on creation constructing a “firmament of heaven,” which does not exist. If they can get past that, they can get past anything.
Flat earthers. Hollow earthers. Young earthers. Creationists. Blood sacrifice cultists. White supremacists. ISIS. One party dictatorships. Radical capitalists. Anti-environmentalists. Climate change deniers. Two world wars in less than a generation. Dropping a-bombs on cities. Fire-bombing cities. Gassing millions of people. Burning the Amazon. Melting the ice caps. Beggars on every street corner and intersection. Guns, millions of guns. Trump.
And then intelligent people ask why don’t the aliens come down and have a chat?
Happy F*ucking New Year.
Funny how all the hominin fossils found so far are much smaller than modern man, while the Old Testament claims that the Earth in the time of Noah was populated by giant humans (the Nephilim, Anakim, Emim and Zamzummim), the offspring of lustful angels and beautiful earthling women. They ranged up to thirty feet in height, and must all have been buried during the Great Flood, but it’s strange that their fossils haven’t turned up yet. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, the Creationists (and Mormons) like to say. To paraphrase Matthew Harrison Brady (Frederic March) in the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, “I leave the agnostics to look for them!”
Hodge did say one thing that was true:
Actually they hardly think once. And that is, of course, the problem.
Well, at least they’re consistent. They fervently believe stories written in contradiction to any reasonably known facts or evidence at the time of writing, much less now, that were probably inventions to support particular religious/political parties. Given the long history of post hoc rationalizations, why should they stop now. It’s practically a major tenet of the Abrahamic religions.
Cervantes, he made the firmament out of ice, foreseeing that he would one day need enough water to flood the world. After the flood he recycled the surplus water into comets.
weylguy, it is well known that spiritual beings such as angels don’t fossilize. I presume the same would be true of their offspring.
here we get very close to the heart of the matter.
this idea that we dominated the earth, it is key as god himself gave it to us and any thing that goes wrong is punishment for our sin or cruelty from the devil. They can not accept that we are not in control and someone must be so god is it, anything that threatens that is fought by reflex without thought. That control and domination are at best temporary and mostly an illusion is lost on them and resisted with heated denial. All of the scientific discoveries thus far point in the opposite direction.
#6: richardemmanuel
When your old buddy said: ‘Recently, eminent scientists have said that Darwin was wrong’, you should have replied: “Yes, don’t we live in amazing times. I was just reading about the committee of renowned theologians who have now proved that the flood story (or Adam and Eve story, or…) is pure myth and was never meant to be taken seriously”.
If he asks how they proved such a thing, just tell him that the details are too complicated for you to explain to him but that he can check it out on the internet, that is, if the churches haven’t suppressed it to protect their financial interests.
The Earth was a shoddy lowest-price-bidder job with short-term contracts, so the different “layers” of rock mostly consist of whatever was the cheapest at the time of that particular contract. The inspectors were easy to bribe, so it was cheaper to leave out the fossils and pay off the officials than go to the trouble of hiring a few artisans to whack up some imaginary beastie remains. This is also why the planet’s covered in water, the specifications called for whisk(e)y, which is pricey — a few drams, bribed inspectors, and a non-existent sewage treatment facility (more inspector bribing) solved that costly problem.
Just as with which fossils are human and which are ape, creationists can’t even agree among themselves about the position of pre-flood, post-flood, and flood deposits in the geological record. There’s a sizable group, Kurt Wise and, I believe, Steve Austin among them, who put the end of the flood at the K/T boundary.
I’d love to see a scholarly debate on that subject. What facts would the two sides marshal in support of their mutually contradictory claims? And are there any creationists who have still other interpretations of the time-line?
I like how he’s also embedded in a “if birds evolved from therapods why were there still therapods” in there. The refusal to understand that sits at the root of so much creationist nonsense.
The waters of the firmament must have been muddy as fuck. Actually, there should be stories of the great landslides from the sky, but that would be even more complicated, wouldn’t it?
Squeeeeee!!!!! “precambrian rabbits”
Cute and, knowing rabbits famous -um- ‘proclivity’, it explains the Cambrian explosion!!
It was probably entirely unintentional, but the title weirdly conjures up the notion “We need Phil Mason (aka Thundertoot) to deal with these creationists again…”
No, please no! I am aware he still exists, but he has definitely ruined the search for rabbits in the precambrian.
=8)-DX
@18 – But it was just so strange, I was non-plussed. Like ‘Hello, I am psychotic’…. ‘My wife is psychotic too’. It just didn’t seem like they were a clear and present danger to Biology. And I wanted to like them yet. Guess what her job turned out to be? – You have failed to guess correctly – (I telepath you). A pianist, I mean an organist, in a crematorium. So they had thought about death a lot, and decided it didn’t really happen. That’s what I reckon. But if I’m brutally honest, all I could think about was her cracking set of superstimuli, and how I wished I could play the piano better.