Hello, Reginald - and welcome to the forum.
Stick around if you are up for it! You can learn a lot here.
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Welcome Reginald,
I’m glad you have joined the conversation here. I want to encourage you to engage in a meaningful way. For example, David Campbell (@paleomalacologist) made the point in post #38 that:
Microfossils are a good example of something incompatible with young-earth and global flood claims, largely neglected by young-earth advocates because the public is ignorant about them. They do not have significant differences in escape ability or hydrodynamic properties. Various types of microfossils do reflect different habitats, but such occur at various levels through the geologic column - there is no pattern of lower elevation to higher elevation habitats. But the types of microfossils change over time, with hundreds of totally different sets of microfossils being found in different layers.
@beaglelady pointed out that flowering plants do not have the ability to run to higher ground, so how does “flood geology” account for the fact that fossils of flowering plants appear in the highest geological strata but not in lower strata?
And Timothy Campbell (@Paraleptopecten) pointed out that immobile animals appear far higher in the geologic column than dinosaurs. Again, this is consistent with animal evolution happening over a period of hundreds of millions of years, but it is not consistent with a global flood in which mobile animals might try to flee to higher ground.
Personally, when I examine evidence like this, I think it might be time to re-evaluate the hermeneutical methods I’m using when I read the Bible. Over 400 years ago, the discoveries of astronomers forced an upheaval in the exegesis of Psalm 104 and other similar passages. Luther and Calvin had insisted that the inerrant Bible in passages like Psalm 104 teaches geocentrism. But the exegesis of Psalm 104 changed–in a good way–when Galileo and then Newton showed that the earth and other planets revolve around the sun.
Similarly, I have learned much about Hebrew thought and the meaning of Genesis 1 - 3 – good things, I think – when I reckoned that a literalistic hermeneutic could not be sustained. I had to rebuild, and what remained after the rebuilding was much stronger and more helpful.
Please give some thought to what friends like David, beaglelady, Timothy, and I have written in this thread.
Best regards,
Chris Falter
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Other depositional scheme problems:
Hydrologic sorting:
The fact that I can find 100 + mm Mercenaria, Glycymeris, or Ostrea compressirostra in the same bucket with a few dozen Caecum (not to mention all the sand) suggests that the deposit was experiencing relatively slow water movement. Santeevoluta never overlapping with Triplofusus, despite their being about the same size, also discredits this.
Elevation:
Volutids, diverse “turrid” faunas, and abundant Conus imply water depths of ~50 m. They are mixed with Donax, Oliva, and Littoraria, al of which are very shallow water, let alone their being way above (occasional fragmented) dinosaurs.
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There are plenty of MDs who have actually done the work of examining fossils in their spare time from medical practice, and have done sound work in paleontology. What Werner has done, however, is a completely superficial “A looks enough like B to a casual untrained observer that I can claim they are the same and use that for an illogical antievolutionary argument.” The first problem is that, upon looking more closely, there are critical differences between the forms that he is claiming are the same. To give modern examples, koala bears look somewhat like bears, but as marsupials they actually have more important similarities to kangaroos. American “robins” are thrushes, European robins are Old World flycatchers, and Australian “robins” are yet another bird group. Classification involves a careful examination of all the features. Ironically, Werner is making the same mistake as the careless paleontologist of the early 1900’s who gets lots of inaccurate young-earth ridicule for naming “Nebraska Man”. The tooth was actually a peccary molar (not a pig), but humans and peccaries are both omnivores, so our molars are pretty similar. Other paleontologists were doubtful from the start, and the correction was soon made, despite the popular publicity.
The Creation Studies Institute claims “Dr. Carl Werner traveled 160,000 miles to find the answer, visiting 10 dinosaur dig sites and 60 natural history museums. To his surprise, he found examples of all of the major plant divisions and all of the major animal phyla groups living today, fossilized alongside the dinosaurs.” All of the plant divisions and animal phyla that have hard parts are found alongside dinosaurs, exactly as evolutionary theory expects. (Non-evolutionary views might also expect to find them all together; that particular fact does not specifically support one or another.) The first dinosaurs lived over 250 million years after the origins of animal phyla; of course they overlap in time.
A specific fossil example that has been claimed to be “just the same” from dinosaur time to now in the young-earth literature (in part based on inaccurate popular reports) is Castorocauda. As the name suggests (castor=beaver, cauda=tail), it has a beaver-like tail and roughly similar body shape. This led to false claims that it’s really a modern beaver along side of dinosaurs. But anyone familiar with beavers, or even with Buc-ees, knows that beavers have the buck teeth typical of rodents. Castorocauda has wildly different teeth, and in fact a platypus is more similar to a beaver in some key features than Castorocauda. Similarly, Answers in Genesis proclaimed that a dinosaur-aged fossil plant was identical to a modern lily. “Lily” actually refers to multiple very different types of plants. The fossil is not identical to any of them and actually represents a primitive monocot (the same major group as lilies, but also palm trees, grasses, orchids, and many other things).
But evolution has no requirement for continuous change. If an organism has something that works, natural selection will favor keeping it the same. (This is why punctuated equilibrium occurs as an example of evolution in action.) There are some organisms that have shown very little change over very long time intervals. So the effort to claim that things are actually just the same is no good as an antievolutionary argument anyway.
If birds occurred in the fossil record before the first dinosaurs, that would be a problem evolutionarily. As birds tend to be more fragile and often live in places that aren’t good for getting buried, their fossil record is likely to be patchier than many dinosaurs. But there is no problem with birds overlapping with dinosaurs, as has already been pointed out.
More generally, the popular Kuhnian model of scientific revolutions is wrong. While there are some valid points, it is extremely oversimplistic and based on an inaccurate picture of the events selected as most closely fitting his model. The reality is that a new scientific idea gains support by convincing people that it better explains all the evidence than the previous ideas. Young-earth and other crank models claim “here is a problem for the standard model, therefore, we can throw it out and accept my model instead.” This ploy is also popular in politics - all about how bad the other candidate is without any evidence that yours is actually better. Of course, it is also often true that the supposed problem for the standard model is imaginary, but the “one problem overturns the standard theory while no amount of problems for my view matter” approach is a basic logical error.
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To clarify, Caecum is a genus of tiny snails, usually well under 1 cm, which would not be hydrodynamically sorted into the same layers as large, thick-shelled clams.
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Dogs are neotenous wolves, just as miniature dogs are neotenous dogs. And man, is of course, a neotenous ape, as is the bonobo. It’s a ubiquitous mechanism driven by energetics at all scales (down to sub-cellular) since at least the pre-Cambrian.
Another example I have seen touted as non-changing over long periods of time is stem-tetrapods (e.g. Ichthyostega) being just like modern cryptobranchids (giant salamanders). Among other things, Ichthyostega has a much more fish-like spine, shoulders with much more limited range of movement (can push up and forwards, but not much side-to-side), lateral lines, fin rays (in the tail), otic notches, labyrinthodont dentition, and seven digits on each hind foot (as opposed to the five that practically all modern salamanders have).
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Yes, and what creationists might not realize is that for the good natural history museums, only a fraction of their collections are displayed in public areas. Usually only working scientists are allowed into the offices and research areas to examine the collections, up close and personal. As a museum member, I’m been on some “backstage tours” and I must say it’s pretty cool. Maybe they need a “take a creationist to work” day.
This is what the Hall of Primitive Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History says:
The roots of the mammalian line reach back almost 300 million years. Some of the very early mammal relatives dominated the landscape millions of years before dinosaurs appeared, and most of these species became extinct. During the age of dinosaurs, most mammals were not much bigger than small rodents. It was after the extinction of the large dinosaurs that the great diversity of mammals arose.
So the good doctor might want to brush up on his reading skills.
Much of the evolutionary findings point to evolution by a species, not evolution/origin of a species. Of course species will evolve in response to habitat, climate, food chain, but that is not evidence for upgrading to another species, which I believe there is no archaelogical evidence for. My research showed that, like much scientific research, there is always a point where an arbitrary choice must be made. Broadly stated, science is not really science(accurate, inerrant, perfect)as commonly assumed. Society has come to believe that science has all the answers. Anyone involved in research will always find more questions than answers, and unless the questions are put aside with arbitrary answers, no progress can be had towards the original goal, which may never be reached without leaps of faith(kind of unscientific). For me it comes down to a man’s brain vs the creator of the universe’s brain. No contest!
Are you familiar with the neutral theory of evolution and neutral drift.
The recognition of the Bible as God’s inerrant word should prompt us to careful study to understand it. We must beware of treating our interpretations as if they were God’s word. The Bible quite strongly emphasizes the importance of honesty. It is true that science is our best efforts to understand God’s normal patterns of running the universe, and so is subject to correction. But claims about what science shows must be honest. New species can be observed evolving all the time in nature, in the lab, and in the fossil record. We also see evolutionary origins of higher-level groups. This is mostly seen in the fossil record, simply because we don’t usually recognize things as higher categories unless they have had time to establish themselves as a distinct group. For example, in the Cambrian we can find a series of fossils, starting with a narrow, somewhat cap-shaped shell. They get narrower and thinner along the edge between them and finally transition into true clams with two shells. Other cap-shaped shells got taller and started to partition off the back parts of the shell. Adding a tissue connection to those chambers allowed the animal to control the fluid and/or gas in them, which allowed adjustment in buoyancy and eventually swimming - a transition from bottom-crawling shells to the swimming cephalopods. Likewise, the various worm-like animals in the Cambrian radiation include a wide assortment of transitional forms such as between onychophorans and arthropods, or between kinorhynchs, priapulids, and loriciferans. Others are primitive deuterostomes, leading towards the origins of chordates and echinoderms. Evolution from one species to another is also a staple of modern young-earth claims (though not that of several decades ago).
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Truth comes from reality – the truth that comes from the reality of the data that God has revealed in the Bible and the truth that comes from the reality of data that God has revealed in creation. They do not and cannot conflict. If they appear to, then our interpretation of one or the other or both is flawed.
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So we shouldn’t trust your brain and neither should we trust your interpretations of the Bible.
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You are right. As with religion itself, it is a personal and private decision.
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Have you actually looked at Werner’s work? Or is this just handwaving dismissal? (the answer to that last question is almost certainly “yes.”) The arguments I often see here in BioLogos are approximately, “Let every evolutionist be true, and every biblical creationist a liar.” Well, that pretty much ends all dialogue without considering the data and evidence(We all share the same data.) By accepting only the interpretations of data that come from within your evolutionary community, this dooms you to living in a comfortable impenetrable philosophical silo where you are insulated from any challenges to your evolutionary faith.
Dr. Werner’s journey began as an evolutionist. He was taught, like the rest of us, lies such as “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” And it was on the basis of these types of lies and misinformation that he accepted evolution as true.
Werner was challenged to prove evolution, to which he replied, “That’s crazy. It has been proven.” But he took on the challenge. Werner began reading and researching. But he found this inadequate, so decided to personally do fieldwork. His wife wisely counseled that no one would believe him unless the work was done right and properly documented. So they purchased high quality photographic equipment and his wife became an expert in using this. They eventually travelled 108,561 miles over three continents, investing enormous amounts of time and their own money to answer the questions Werner had about evolution, in this case, specifically about the fossil record. (This exposes the false and irrelevant assertions that creationists sit on their duff and don’t do any field work, or that they are in it for the money.)
In these travels, Werner and Werner interviewed many scientists including paleontologists at universities, digs, and museums. And yes, when permitted access, they viewed the fossils in the “back rooms.” (So much for the snide “take a creationist to the museum” remark.)
I mentioned what Werner calls “the naming game.” Werner discusses the issues of fossil species naming in his book. Names are generally given to fossils by their discoverer, not by a committee of scientists. I doubt that there are many paleontologists that have studied fossils in museums around the world to the same depth that Werner has, so it is somewhat understandable that they would think they have found a “new species.” In fact, finding new fossil species is one of the actions that advances a paleontologist’s reputation and career.
So before giving a hand-waving dismissal, you might want to consider what Werner discovers. You will learn important facts and concepts:
- Many millions of years old (using deep time dating) fossils are indistinguishable from modern species. So contrary to what we would expect from an evolutionary perspective, many species are virtually unchanged over millions of years—unless you want to posit that they were perfectly adapted to their environment and that environment didn’t substantially change over millions of years although somehow the fossilized organism was catastrophically buried for preservation.
- Even in modern species, there are wide variations in individuals. So how can one differentiate species by the appearance of the fossils? And no, being an “expert” is hardly an advantage because of this situation. For example, a hundred thousand years from now if 40 different varieties of domestic dog fossils, all one species, were dug up, from Chihuahua to Great Dane, we can be almost certain they would be classified as different species by “experts.”
- There are many fossils that are found that only end up in the bins in museum backrooms, or are discarded at the dig site. For example, at a dinosaur dig, the researchers are researching dinosaurs. That is fine as far as it goes, but a lot of evidence for other plants and animals coexisting with dinosaurs is lost. Werner learned by asking about “modern looking fossils” that many are found but not documented. So to posit that absence of evidence is evidence of absence is fallacious, as often no one in the field is looking for that kind of evidence.
- The orientation of the fossil as displayed and photographed has a lot to do with how well they can be compared.
So don’t argue with these findings, even if you can’t embrace Werner’s conclusions. You can learn from what he learned.
The Werners came back with tens of thousands of photographs (I couldn’t find the precise number on re-reading.) How better can one compare one fossil to another, or a fossil to a living specimen than to have a significant library of photographs from museums around the world? I think it is fair to say that even a trained paleontologist cannot better compare one fossil to another in disparate locations than to have excellent photographic evidence such as Werner collected.
And significantly, Werner shares this photographic evidence to all of us so that we can make up our own minds. Isn’t that what it is all about? Please inform me if there is anything evolutionists provide that close to what Werner provides in photographic evidence about the fossils they found so that I can make up my own mind rather than simply accepting the assertions of “experts.”
“Creationists need to do their own fieldwork.” “Oh, Werner did extensive field work. Oops.” So of course, when creationists do their own field work, it is dismissed because the person does not have academic credentials from evolutionist institutions. (Do you see the cynical evolutionist’s “Heads I win, tails you lose” ploy?)
Quote: “That is a usual YEC claim usually based on the “rocks are used to date fossils and fossils are used to date rocks” which is a circular argument.”
Wait a minute. It is absolutely true that in the past, deep time geologists used “rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks” circular reasoning even if they no longer do. So in the past it was legitimate for creation scientists to identify that logical fallacy when prior to radiometric dating this argument was used by deep time proponents. And it is legitimate for creationists to point out this serious flaw in the historical foundation of deep time geology—that deep time was posited before there was even the flawed radiometric dating evidence for it.
And to be honest, deep time geologists still do use rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks. Don’t they? They assume that radiometric dating is correct, and use already assigned dates to certain rock layers and by that, determine the age of the fossils in that strata. And since they have already dated a particular type of fossil, they do by the fossil date the rock layer it is found in. If radiometric dating is accurate, then it is legitimate to do so. Deep time geologists do not continually do radiometric dating, but do rely on presuppositions which they believe are supportable and valid. But if radiometric dating is not accurate, then deep time geologists are using invalid circular reasoning.
Related–in my reading just this weekend, I also learned from Stephen J. Gould writing on the history of science that it was the catastrophic geologists in the past that were doing almost all of the field work, and that uniformitarian geologists such as Lyle were predominantly armchair scientists. The reason that uniformitarian geology was embraced and catastrophic geology rejected, according to Stephen J. Gould, was not because of the data or hard work done by the uniformitarian geologists, but because the catastrophist geologists were dismissed by being disparaged and ridiculed. Nothing to do with the data. Could this happen today? Of course, unless human nature has improved over the centuries.
So let’s be a bit generous here. Positions are always changing. Isn’t that how science progresses? Or is that principle valid only for evolutionist and not for creationists—creationists today are responsible for every position a creationist has ever held? I think not. There are a lot of ill informed posts in these forums, both by uniformed or not-up-to-date creationists and evolutionists. Both creationist and evolutionist positions are routinely misrepresented in these forums. It is good to identify and correct the misinformation. Isn’t that one of the benefits of interacting?
But to infer that one position or the other has been discredited because of some or many misinformed or not up-to-date individuals is neither true nor helpful. Let’s not get into the unhelpful mode of “the pot calling the kettle black.”
A reference would be nice.
Nothing I have read on this history would support this.
Maybe, but there are still some YEC who make the false claim of circular reasoning. There have been some, by your description, uninformed or not-up-to-date creationists make that argument here. Which was the point of my initial post.
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Speaking of deep time, I notice that you have never responded to an earlier post. Either you haven’t read it, couldn’t understand it or you are in complete denial. Again (it’s short):
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X-Rays, CT scans, measurements, DNA analysis, chemical analysis, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
All kinds of stuff!
Research is so much than taking pictures.
Speaking of research, where are the paleontology papers Werner published in peer-reviewed science magazines?
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