Hi Ron,
thank you for your comment and stating what you believe to be true.
“Uniformitarianism, also known as the Doctrine of Uniformity or the Uniformitarian Principle, is the assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in our present-day scientific observations have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe.”
And there it is in your quote, the word assumption.
In a similar vein, my understanding of uniformitarian philosophy, for what its worth, is that it originated from James Hutton who said, “The result therefore of our present inquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning - no prospect of an end.” That belief was championed by Charles Lyell who strenuously argued at the Royal Society, London in the mid nineteenth century that the formation of Earth’s crust took place through countless small changes occurring over vast periods of time, all according to known natural laws. His “uniformitarian” proposal was that the forces molding the planet today have operated continuously throughout its history. Of course I strenuously disagree with the whole uniformitarian concept and see it as a belief system that has deceived many since it was first pushed on academia about one and a half centuries ago.
Since the mid nineteenth century, of course the definition has been expanded to include more than just geology, but at it’s core, whether you agree or disagree, it is an assumption and the basic thrust remains the same.
But you claim that the two statements of mine that you quoted contradict each other, which I refute as clearly nonsense, and yet another baseless claim.
I do not consider uniformitarian philosophy to be at all valid because uniformitarian philosophy makes absolutely no allowance for the catastrophic events that took place such as the global flood as reliably and faithfully recorded in the Bible.
The magnitude of the flood completely reshaped the surface of the planet, and is clearly evidenced by the geology that screams out of vast continental scale catastrophism.
Repeatable, empirical science that doesn’t rely on assumptions about what happened in the distant past as practiced in the lab by millions of honest scientists who have no other agenda except to test samples and hypotheses and draw conclusions from their results is absolutely valid and calls the alleged ages of dinosaur bone and soft tissue into question!
The findings from that same empirical science in chemistry and physics doesn’t permit the types of organic matter found in the dinosaur bones to exist for 65 to 300 million years, unless (wittingly or unwittingly), the scientist/s doing the research already have a ‘deep time’ worldview that influences how they see the world. Having that worldview is not at all surprising as it is constantly rammed into everyone in western cultures, on the media, in the educational institutions and faithfully not questioning it can be the difference between getting a job position or a research grant, such is the power play these days.
What do you think of the following statements from leading secular scientists:
Dr Marcelo Gleiser, an agnostic theoretical physicist and cosmologist who won the 2019 Templeton Prize, admits, “When you hear very famous scientists making pronouncements like … cosmology has explained the origin of the universe and the whole, and we don’t need God anymore. That’s complete nonsense,” he added. “Because we have not explained the origin of the universe at all.”
Reference: Couronne, I., Physicist Marcelo Gleiser: ‘Science does not kill God’, news.yahoo.com, 19 March 2019.
And they never will for it was a miracle of God (Genesis 1:1)
We are all one race, one family
The front page of the April 2018 National Geographic showed a blue-eyed, fair-skinned, blonde-haired girl standing alongside her brown-eyed, medium-brown skinned, dark-haired sister, with the caption, “Black and white: These twin sisters make us rethink everything we know about race”. Editor Susan Goldberg admitted that, “some of the magazine’s archive material left her ‘speechless’, including a 1916 photo of Australian Aborigines with the caption ‘South Australian Blackfellows: These savages rank lowest in intelligence of all human beings’.”
Goldberg, S., For decades, our coverage was racist. To rise above our past, we must acknowledge it, nationalgeographic.com, April 2018
As the late Stephen Jay Gould once wrote, “Biological arguments for racism … increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.” The NG magazine cover and caption confirms that we are indeed all “one” race (Acts 17:26)
Gould, S.J., Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Belknap-Harvard Press, pp. 127–128, 1977.
A fossil ichthyosaur from Germany’s famous Holzmaden quarry has been found with “fossilised blubber” and skin remains. Called Stenopterygius, this extinct marine reptile is said to be 180 million years old. Dr Johan Lindgren of Lund University in Sweden says, “the still-flexible skin meant the specimen must have been fossilised so fast that organic molecules were trapped inside the mineral component of the fossil."
indgren, J. et al, Soft-tissue evidence for homeothermy and crypsis in a Jurassic ichthyosaur, Nature 564:359–365, 5 December 2018.
Recent fossil finds by Chinese scientists revealed such an astonishing level of preservation that slow-n-gradual burial is not an option. Found along the Danshui river in China’s Hubei province, thousands of fossilised jellyfish, sponges, anemones, worms, arthropods and algae are said to have been “entombed in an ancient underwater mudslide.” Dr Martin Smith, a palaeontologist at Durham University excitedly said, “[The] preservational quality is mindblowing … If you sent a time traveller back to the Cambrian period armed with a camera and an x-ray machine, the images they’d come back with would be nothing compared to these fossils, which preserve detail finer than a human hair.”
Sample, I., ‘Mindblowing’ haul of fossils over 500m years old unearthed in China, The Guardian, 21 March 2019.
In their paper the scientists make clear that the exquisite preservation of the fossils is due to a sudden mud flow that swept the animals into cold, deep water, thus slowing decay.
Fu, D. et al, The Qingjiang biota—A Burgess Shale–type fossil Lagerstätte from the early Cambrian of South China, Science 363(6433):1338–1342, 22 March 2019.
Fossil evidence that is wonderfully compatible with the Noahic Flood was reported in the prestigious journal Science.
Wang, X. et al, Egg accumulation with 3D embryos provides insight into the life history of a pterosaur, Science 358(6367):1197–1201, 1 December 2017
Over 215 eggs (maybe up to 300) were found in a sandstone block, assigned to a species of pterosaur called Hamipterus tianshanensis. Some had embryonic remains, but what really caught popular attention was that the “pterosaur eggs had soft parchment-like shells”.
Authors Xiaolin Wang (Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing) and Alexander Kellner (National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro) write, “This sedimentological data, associated with the exceptional quantity of eggs and bones, indicate that events of high energy such as storms have passed over a nesting site, causing the eggs to be moved inside the lake where they floated for a short period of time, becoming concentrated and eventually buried along with disarticulated skeletons.”
That is quite imaginative, but what is certain is the conclusion that a high energy watery event is needed to explain such preservation.
Briggs, H., Fossilised eggs shed light on reign of pterosaurs, Home - BBC News, 30 November 2017.
In recent years, Dr Mary Schweitzer, famous for publications of genuine unfossilised soft tissue in dinosaur bones, has been experimenting to see whether iron-rich fluids could explain how their tissues, proteins and DNA could have lasted for millions of years. But Prof Matthew Collins, a world authority on biogeochemistry and biomolecular archaeology at University of York (UK), is very sceptical that iron from haemoglobin could have done the magic required: “I have yet to hear a plausible explanation for how soft tissues can be preserved for this long … for me they’re defying basic chemistry and physics. … Iron may slow down the decay process but it’s not clear how it could be arrested altogether.”
Prof Matthew Collins quoted in: Morton, M.C., Cretaceous collagen: Can molecular paleontology glean soft tissue from dinosaurs? Earth, 16 October 2017; earthmagazine.org.
And finally, back to Mary Schweitzer, since the discoveries she made were interpreted within the uniformitarian dogma, that Theistic evolutionists believe, she was extremely sceptical at first, e.g. the pioneer Dr Mary Schweitzer:
“When you think about it, the laws of chemistry and biology and everything else that we know say that it should be gone, it should be degraded completely.”
Schweitzer, M., Nova Science Now, May 2009, cross.tv - Dinosaur Soft Tissue Troubles Evolutionists.
I am well aware that Mary Schweitzer has tried to explain the results away, but most unconvincing from the viewpoint of known empirical chemistry. The presence of detectable proteins such as collagen, haemoglobin, osteocalcin, actin, and tubulin that are complex molecules that continually tend to break down to simpler ones.
Thus, it is obvious to anyone who has eyes to see and a mind to reason that the utterly preserved cells of dinosaur soft tissue, that are most definitely NOT remnants, that they must be relatively recent in age or they simply would not exist. The belief that scores of different dinosaur soft tissue from all over the Earth are 65 to 300 million years old merely serves to show the high degree of indoctrination that many have assimilated in there absolute obedience to the ruling paradigm that controls academia and the media in the word today.
The very fact that people actually believe that examples of exquisitely preserved dinosaur soft tissue CELLS in some cases are hundreds of millions of years of years old demonstrates an inability to think for themselves, and instead dogmatically hold to the powerful ruling paradigm! This clear fact is multiplied further when we consider precisely where many of the dinosaur bone and soft tissue were found in environments where climatic conditions are most unfavourable for preservation.
Around four and a half thousand years is a very long time, however, the incessant indoctrination of deep time in academia and the media, has believers in evolution think of it as a mere blink of the eye, such is their absolute adherence to interpreting everything within a uniformitarian ‘deep time’ paradigm framework.
God Bless,
jon