You are not allowed to follow the evidence


I have no patience anymore. I was sent this video titled Evolutionists Have Been WRONG About Dinosaurs for Years from Answers in Genesis, and I was only able to watch the first 3 minutes.

It opens on two people, one claiming to be a paleoartist, the other a Ph.D. paleontologist. They have to be failures at those occupations because they also announce that they are employed by Answers in Genesis. At least, though, they are quick to state their objection. Is it reasonable to believe in feathered dinosaurs in a Biblical worldview? Their answer is no.

They’re easily refuted, of course, just by showing a dinosaur fossil with feathers. That’s pretty stupid, you’d think, to frame up a target so easily shot down. But they have cleverly created an excuse in advance!

They show some clips from one of the Jurassic Park movies, and telling us that those are fake. Did you know that? That Hollywood magnified the size of dinosaurs and made them look flashier? And that the Pyroraptor holotype was fragmentary and lacked any feather impressions. If only the scientists would stop relying on movies for their data. Of course, they were instead relying on data from other specimens of dromaeosaurids that do have feathers. Those don’t count, though, because then they said the thing that made me close the video.

Evolutionists have been changing the meaning of words…to better fit their evolutionary worldview.

They’re making a definitional argument. Birds have feathers, and dinosaurs don’t, therefore any fossil found with feathers is a bird, not a dinosaur. See? Those dastardly scientists changed the meaning of the word “dinosaur!” That’s it. That’s all they’ve got. The universe is fixed and unchanging, just like the Bible says, and whenever a scientist finds evidence of species in flux, they’re wrong. Because the Bible tells them so.

Comments

  1. mathman85 says

    The late David Menton of AiG infamously concluded a speech on this topic thus:

    If a dinosaur has feathers, then it is a bird.

    So if we go by Menton’s “criterion”, AiG actually agrees that at least some dinosaurs had feathers—namely, the birds.
    I just don’t understand why they’ve elected to die on this particular hill. It’s no different in import than insisting that whales aren’t mammals.

  2. chrislawson says

    Clearly they have negative understanding of what a holotype is. Also worth noting: the holotype specimen for Pyroraptor is a single foot claw, so of course it has no feather imprints. By this argument, the foot of a chicken proves it is not a bird.

    Mathman@2 — using modern taxonomy standards, birds are indeed dinosaurs. But as you say, the AiG isn’t interested in arguing from evidence, logic, or integrity.

  3. Owlmirror says

    What the heck is a paleoartist?

    An artist who specializes in creating artistic extrapolated depictions of extinct organisms. There are many good ones who are not creationsts. Carl Buell comes immediately to mind, but there are plenty of others.

    If you’ve ever seen the art that is included with press releases about new paleontological finds, you’ve been looking at the work of a paleoartist.

  4. raven says

    I just don’t understand why they’ve elected to die on this particular hill.

    They didn’t.

    Young Earth creationism has been a Zombie for several centuries by now. All educated people who aren’t religious fanatics accept that the earth is old and the universe is even older.

    YEC survives as a shambling Zombie that fewer and fewer people care about, much less believe.

    Ironically, the current Zombie isn’t even all that old.
    YEC made a resurgence in the 1960s with Henry Morris.

    Since the mid-20th century, young Earth creationists—starting with Henry Morris (1918–2006)—have developed and promoted a pseudoscientific explanation called creation science as a basis for a religious belief in a supernatural, geologically recent creation, in response to the scientific acceptance of Charles Darwin’s …

    Young Earth creationism – Wikipedia

  5. says

    They show some clips from one of the Jurassic Park movies [Jurassic World: Dominion, I bet], and telling us that those are fake.

    Well duh! Everyone knows that they’re fake, just like the creationists’ depictions of dinosaurs in all their materials.

  6. Artor says

    It’s terrible that Steven Spielberg killed that majestic triceratops to make his silly movie. Wait, is that fake too? Inconceivable!

  7. muttpupdad says

    Owosso @7 they would have yo know that they graduated with honors from the finest Babble Colleges that were willing to take their money.

  8. birgerjohansson says

    Family Guy made a good summary of creationism; the lady genie from ‘I Dream Of Jeanie’ created the animals by going “boiiinng” for every species.

    Or maybe Zod is like David or the engineers in the Alien prequels. That would make me dislike the concepts of gods as intensely as the prequels.

  9. birgerjohansson says

    Am I the only one to think the feathered theropod at the top looks like…whatever the critter in “The Deadly Claw” was?

  10. says

    I saw Sondheim and Lapine’s Into The Woods and it said there are giants in the sky, but some scientists are telling me there’s no evidence for giants in the sky?

  11. says

    From the very beginning until now, I’ve always suspect that these idiots watch too many sci-fi movies and TV shows and read far too many sci-fi, fantasy literature, probing for anything to add to their creation fantasy scenarios no matter how fake, far-fetched, and ridiculously stupid they are.

  12. Owlmirror says

    I downloaded the video and (computer generated) caption, and watched/listened a bit. The very first few seconds had something that reminded me of something else:

    One evolutionist even said a penguin is just as much a terrible lizard as a stegosaur

    A quick search found the source of the quote:

    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ask-smithsonian-what-is-dinosaur-180967448/

    Which is indeed all about what dinosaurs are, and why birds are classified as dinosaurs (and a disagreement among paleontologists about which groups of dinosaurs are related, and in which ways).

    But the use of “stegosaurus” reminded me of an old XKCD (which the author of the article might have been thinking of)

    https://xkcd.com/1211/

    Which compares a sparrow to a tyrannosaurus, and then both of those to a stegosaurus. As the comic notes :

    By any reasonable definition, T. rex is more closely related to sparrows than to Stegosaurus. [Diagram showing that Stegosaurus came earlier than T. rex, along with it showing that T. rex came closer in time to sparrows. Evaluation criteria “separation by time”, “phylogenetic distance” and “physical similarity” are highlighted in red.]”

    (text copy-pasted from explainxkcd, which provides transcripts, commentary, and additional context to many xkcd comics)

  13. Owlmirror says

    A bit further on:

    Both Dr Haynes and I are Christians who believe the account of history in God’s word the Bible, and we’re going to discuss whether the idea of feathered dinosaurs is reasonable to believe in a Biblical worldview

    Well, there’s the problem.

    Translation: “Both Dr Haynes and I are members of a cult that believes that the contents of a big book of Middle-Eastern fairy tales can be called ‘history’, and we’re going to discuss whether the idea of feathered dinosaurs is reasonable to believe given that our worldview includes an interpretation of the big book of Middle-Eastern fairy tales that excludes scientific facts that the authors of the book didn’t know, and that we don’t like”

  14. Owlmirror says

    Paleoart link dumps…

    It looks like Carl Buell doesn’t have a web presence anymore.

    still, an images search works

    He used to blog here, but his images were mostly linked to from flickr — and the flickr images weren’t archived for some reason? Anyway. the domain expired ages ago.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20080602105706/http://olduvaigeorge.com/

    Another art hosting site, now also an expired, and now squatted domain:
    https://web.archive.org/web/20110201131533/http://carlbuell.com/

    He’s listed as a coauthor on this paper, “A phylogenetic blueprint for a modern whale”

  15. Owlmirror says

  16. StevoR says

    ^ Owlmirror : Thankyou.

    Love Palaeoart & spaceart. Imagintion, vision. Sense of awe and wonder.

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