More Nonsense from Ken Ham

Faith & Science Conversation
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The provenance of the Ica stones has been more than questioned. They were admitted to be fakes by the person who “discovered” them. Not only that, but he appeared on a BBC documentary in which he showed how he faked them with a dentist’s drill and how he gave them their “aged” appearance by baking them in cow dung.

In any case, far from predicting discoveries about dinosaurs such as circles on their skin, they depict dinosaurs in ways that were widely portrayed in the 1960s but that are now known to be inaccurate or even outright false. T-Rex is depicted standing upright and dragging its tail along the ground, while in reality it stood horizontally with its tail sticking straight out the back. Theropod dinosaurs are now known to have had feathers, which are not depicted on the stones. None of the dinosaurs depicted have ever been discovered fossilised in Peru, while megafauna that did inhabit the area, such as terror birds and carnotaurus, are notable by their absence. The stones also depict UFOs, modern surgical techniques, world maps, and horses and carriages – a form of transport that was unknown to the Inca and Nazca people before the arrival of Europeans.

Sorry @cewoldt, but you really are scraping the bottom of the barrel here. The claim that humans and dinosaurs coexisted is an extraordinary one and as such it requires extraordinary evidence. A tiny handful of drawings that are at best highly ambiguous and at worst blatant forgeries simply isn’t going to cut it.

Fun fact: my cousin is on the staff of Carlisle Cathedral. He assures me that the idea that sauropod dinosaurs roamed the Carlisle area in the 15th century is bonkers.

In any case, these engravings are so ambiguous that I can’t even tell which end is the head and which end is the tail.

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Wow. Then what does that say about the honesty of the YEC site still promoting them? That’s worrisome (maybe it is ignorance, though, of the retraction)

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You really need to read what I wrote in response to @SixDays above, Craig:

Were scientists surprised by what Mary Schweitzer found? That’s the wrong question to be asking. The question is whether scientists had any measurements to demonstrate that what she had found was impossible given the 66 million year timescale. They did not, so there was no need for anyone to “casually dismiss” anything.

There’s nothing “evolutionist” whatsoever about that. It’s how every area of science works.

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At least one YEC site is saying not to promote them.
Bad arguments

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Hi Craig,

Even Creation Ministries International renounces the use of the Ica Stones and the Mexican figurines as evidence!

In the case of both the Ica stones and the Acambaro figurines … the stories rely heavily on anecdotal evidence, and there is some uncomfortable counter evidence in both cases (numerous known cases of fraud and secrecy with the Ica stones, and reasonably powerful circumstantial evidence of fraud for the Acambaro figurines).

Source: Ica stones bad arguments

You are presenting known frauds and forgeries as evidence! To me, this shows that you are so concerned with upholding your opinion about evolution that you have abandoned good judgment. And if I cannot trust your good judgment, I must conclude that you are not to be trusted when you speak about anything scientific.

You clearly love your children and are involved in their education. That’s good. When they go off to college, they may very well learn that what their dad told them about God’s creation was based on frauds, forgeries, and misrepresentations. What will that do to their faith?

Please consider this: Now is the time to reckon with how you have handled evidence, before your kids get blindsided as young adults.

Sincerely,
Chris

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Hey, I wrote an article about this. It really does all make sense, but you don’t need humans co-existing with dinosaurs for it to make sense.

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So, apart from the excellent indirect, anecdotal evidence, and the books and the documentaries, that ancient miners and excavators found dinosaur remains, which of course they would have, absolutely obviously with hindsight, way before Cuvier, are there any actual links to academic findings. What does Wiki say?

From here:

There is a very interesting text by Pliny in which he tells us how the mayor Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, in the year 58 BC, brought to Rome and exhibited the fossil remains of a monster which appeared in Joppa , the present Jaffa , next to Tel-Aviv . Ancient people traditionally placed the episode of the myth of Perseus and Andromeda in Joppa (see in this blog itself. Perseus and Andromeda ).

Strabo, XVI, 2.28 (759); Mela, I, 11/64; Pliny NH V, 13/69; Josephus Bello Iudaico, III, 9.3 (420); Pausanias, IV, 35.6; Jerome, Comm. Ad Ion., I, 3 also placed the episode there, or at least they said that remains of the chains of Andromeda emerged from the rock. Alost all of them mention that remains of Andromeda´s chains emerged from the rock of Joppa .

Naturally the remains brought by Scaurus were identified with the sea monster that was supposed to devour Andromeda .

Pliny [23-79 AD] tells us, NH IX, 4/11:

M. Scaurus, in his ædileship, exhibited at Rome, among other wonderful things, the bones of the monster to which Andromeda was said to have been exposed, and which he had brought from Joppa, a city of Judæa. These bones exceeded forty feet in length (about 13 meters), and the ribs were higher than those of the Indian elephant, while the back-bone was a foot and a half in thickness (about 45 centimeters).
…
Suetonius [69-122 AD], also makes a reference to fossil remains of large animals when he refers to the “villae” of Augustus and says in Life of Augustus 72 3

Those of his own, which were far from being spacious, he adorned, not so much with statues and pictures, as with walks and groves, and things which were curious either for their antiquity or rarity; such as, at Capri, the huge limbs of sea-monsters and wild beasts, which some affect to call the bones of giants; and also the arms of ancient heroes. (J. Eugene Reed. Alexander Thomson. Philadelphia. Gebbie & Co. 1889.)

The above writer Antonio Marco Martínez mentions Adrienne Mayor.

I’m astounded at my ignorance of these ancient historical findings. If Rome found dinosaur bones, and Greece, and China, so did Persia, Babylon, Assyria, Egypt. Even the Jews. Especially the intelligentsia exposed to all of these cultures.

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In the Sahara, Wadi El Hitan had whale fossils laying exposed in the remote desert. Talk about the fish that got away stories which must have circulated from any ancients who encountered these.

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The psalm talking of leviathan being fed to the beasts of the desert maybe a reference to those whale fossils as well.

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There are some pretty good reasons to believe the behemoth was actually a bull or an ox. Ben Stanhope has a pretty good video on the subject.
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AxGARM5cYKY]

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Even the ESV study Bible notes that “tail like a cedar” was undoubtedly a Hebrew euphemism intended to communicate virility.

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I don’t think that either Leviathan or Behemoth were intended to be identified with any specific known creature. Rather, it seems to me that they are more generic terms referring to large sea creatures and large land animals in general respectively. The traits that are listed are something of a mishmash – a tail swinging like a cedar could easily refer to a crocodile, and bones like bars of iron could be inspired by elephants. Furthermore, in Isaiah 27, Leviathan is specifically described as a sea serpent.

The idea that they refer to sauropod dinosaurs is eisegesis rather than exegesis, and outright science fiction at that. Note in particular that nowhere are we told that behemoth has a long, sauropod-like neck.

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That’s a bit of a stretch. I’d like it to be true, but it’s a lonnnnnggg stretch

Psalms 74:14 - Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness

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Interesting, some versions translate it “people of the desert”. Others “creatures” and “animals.” In any case, I can see how stories of big bones in the desert would inspire the psalmist.

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They were discovered three thousand years after his inspiration.

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Discovered by modern man. I suspect the wanderers of the desert had come across them long before, becoming perhaps the subject of stories around the campfire. Many fossils in the Valley of the Whales have been exposed and are easily seen. In any case, we will never know as it is all conjecture, but it does lend perhaps a backstory to the rather odd imagery of a sea monster in the desert, fed to its inhabitants.

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The myth is universal.

ANE

Leviathan - Hebrews <=1000 BCE =
Lotan - Ugaritic Canaanites >=1200 BCE =
Tiamat - Ancient Babylonian c 1600 BCE =
Temtun - Syrian c 1700 BCE

whence

Typhon - Greek c 700 BCE

but

Jörmungandr - Norse
Vritra - Hindu

There are Irish myths, Hawaiian myths, there is overlap with the Egyptian - Indian Worm Ouroboros - the cycle of life, years, seasons .

There is something almost Jungian going on here throughout all emergent, marine civilization. Something fed by deep human universal dream time psychology; fear of the deep, primal chaos.

This has nothing to do with whale bones in the remote Egyptian desert, apart from our looping it back in to the deep, emergent, psycho-sexual myth.

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“Tail like a cedar.”

image
It has also been suggested that behemoth was a hippo or elephant.

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But there is a problem here. If the Ica stone showing the circles on the dino skin was fraudulent, the fraud creator was on to something, because no fossilized skin with circles had yet been discovered. That was my point. The same article you note also states that there are good peer reviewed articles about how long soft tissues are likely to last–good evidence for a recent creation. Why should I accept any scientific arguments from people who say that soft tissues can remain after 65 milliion–and more–years?

Sure, there are fraudulent ica stones, but there are also genuine ones. The fact that this one was displayed prior to the knowledge we now have of dinosaur skin suggests this one is not fraudulent.

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image

image

So what is it an engraving of? Here are the other engravings, with names on them, just in case these are also ambiguous. Not that all of these are known animals. The sauropod then is just from the engraver’s imagination? Yes, now the engravings are covered by a carpet to prevent further wear, and the dinosaur engraving seems to be more worn than the rest, so it is harder to tell the head from the tail. But I trust that those who find this one ambiguous don’t find the dog, fish and eel also hard to identify. But just in case, the names are included.