Good Lord, give me patience…how do you handle “that’s not evidence”?
Instead of trying to prove your case in the affirmative, disprove their case.
If there is no evolution, then:
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why are some Creationist groups accepting a period of hyper-inflation after the animals get out of the ark?
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why are virtually all the mammals in Australia (except those with wings like bats!) shown to have unusually close genetics, and they are all marsupials… (except for recent imports like humans, dogs and rabbits)? If Australia was swept clean of animal life by the flood, and animals we find their now came from animals that exited the Ark … why didn’t any of the any of the placental mammals follow the marsupials to Australia before it detached from the coast? - - especially the placental predators?
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And if whales didn’t come from water-loving mammals with 4 legs, why do they only appear in the fossil record until there were large mammals before them… and yet there are no dinosaurs anywhere a part of that recent history? Proto-whales appear out of nowhere in the fossil record … while the giant marine reptiles disappeared much earlier… were the marine reptiles such awful swimmers that they all drowned before rhinos, elephants and horses did?
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Wasn’t the Ark supposed to have all the land animals? And yet we find all dinos like stegasaurus and T-Rex drowned in the fossil records…and no examples of the Sumerians fighting them off like they did lions and tigers (who were on the ark, right)?
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Here’s where I got to:
All the animals for which there are fossils died off soon after the Flood, but for the small minority that survived to this day, there just happen to be no fossils. Does that make sense?
Response: there is no evidence whatsoever for transitional fossils.
Oh, and I brought up that there are no hippopotamuses (hippopotami?) buried with diplodocus, etc.
“There is no evidence whatsoever for transitional fossils.”
And yeah, I asked why Noah did such a poor job preserving all the animals. He did preserve them all; they died off after the Flood. That’s how I got to the first sentence in this post.
I think this approach is by far the best one can take for addressing creationists. Simply ask questions that lead to absurdities in their positions, but make perfect sense under evolution. I’d like to ask why we, not only have junk DNA in us as humans, but why we have junk DNA that is only functional in our bird ancestors, such as the vitellogenin genes that produce egg yolk. Why on Earth do we, humans, have bird junk DNA that is functional in modern day birds?
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I think you mean the reptilian ancestors of mammals.
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Eggs, reptilians, whateva, I’m not a human ancestor buff (yet).
Ask them to get out their mobile phone, type “evidence for evolution” into Google, and provide a coherent explanation why every result that comes back is not evidence for evolution.
And explain to them that anyone else to whom they make the same claim will do exactly the same thing.
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Lately I’m inclined to just say, “You’re allowed to be wrong.” Smile. Change subject. It really isn’t worth it. People who are honestly investigating these things figure out soon enough which side of the debate has evidence. People who are just playing games don’t really care about real evidence. So why waste your time? Unless of course you are hoping that some of the former group learn something from eavesdropping on conversations with the latter group, as happens sometimes when the conversations happen in forums like this one, in which case you have to keep in mind who your real audience is to avoid frustration.
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What about microevolution? That occurs. Everyone in my family has blue eyes; however, I have green eyes and I am the natural and legal son of my parents. That does show some shift in genetics. Also, I am not a Young Earth Creationist; on the contrary, I accept Progressive Creationism and Intelligent Design. I do not see fixity of species in nature. Also, what about languages changing? Can you read Anglo-Saxon? It is English. For example, " Ich cann water drinken. Also, Willst thu ma habben? The last sentence in High German would be: Willst du mehr haben?
I have to agree with Christy here. People who really want to know will know. I found my way to biologos because i wanted to know. And i have found. But others here come to biologos to tell us how wrong we are but are always kind of ignorant to what we are saying.
Since you know that these non-sense sentences are always come up, you might as well come up with your own terse response, something like - - there’s no point bringing up your objections if you can’t resolve the contradictions of your own beliefs.
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All the animals for which there are foossils have not died off after the flood. We have fossil whales. We have fossil cows. We have fossil lions. We have fossil bears. You say they survived the flood… so what happened to the stegosaurs? And what happened to the giant marine reptiles? This is not a one-time problem… there are NO dinosaurs beyond a certain size that survived your flood… we call them birds today.
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Your definition of transitional fossils is not how scientists use the term. To avoid this confusion,
the term “intermediate fossils” is becoming more common amongst scientists and they relate to Cladistics.
If you don’t know what cladistics is or what it accomplishes, I strongly suggest you stop talking about
“transitional” or “intermediate” fossils. -
The comment “there is no evidence whatsover for transitional fossils” has nothing to do with the problem of closely related marsupials dominating Australia, with not a single placental mammal. This only makes sense with long term evolution, and with early placental mammals being too far from Australia to occupy the territory before it separated from the mainland. The flood scenario has zero explanation for not only how the marsupials arrived at Australia before all the other mammals, when they left the Ark at the same time… but how Australia must have lurched into the ocean with enough speed that even pursuing lions, tigers and bears couldn’t catch up to the Speedy Koala bears, Slow Loris, burrowing Wombats and all the other less than swift marsupials?
Most pro-Evolutionists (including myself!) have not spent enough reading about Cladistics to actually understand how “intermediate fossils” are categorized and used.
Do not let them fixate on Transitional fossils. Explain that they don’t know what the term even means, so how could they possibly arrive at their conclusion.
I think that’s a good idea, though as others have said it depends whether the person really wants to learn – otherwise the easy response is simply “God did it,” or “That’s the way God wanted to do it and who are we to question that?” I think many YEC (as I once did) simply internalize the idea that “God wants us to be weird” and so disagreeing with mountains of evidence simply shows how much faith one has.
I’m with you on this. The real debate is not about the science, it is in the worldviews and theology. One side holds a particular interpretation of Genesis higher than anything else, and sees any conflict with that view as an attack on scripture itself. My admittedly biased viewpoint is that my team holds the goodness and love of God highest, and to deny the truth of creation is ultimately to malign the character of God, as it makes him a deceiver and places him as putting stumbling blocks to impede our coming to relationship with him.
Perhaps those views are irreconcilable, and we just have to accept the differences and love one another.
Sometimes I put the ball back in their court with some simple questions (of which there are more if we are including the age of the Earth and Noah’s Flood):
What features would a fossil need in order for you to consider it evidence for humans evolving from ape-like ancestors?
What type of shared genetic marker would you consider evidence for common ancestry between species?
What type of physical evidence would you consider evidence for evolution with respect to the distribution of shared and derived features in living and fossil species?
What type of genetic divergence and similarities between species would you consider evidence for evolution?
If they can’t explain what they would consider to be evidence, then it only shows that they have taken a dogmatic position against the theory.
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As my post above discusses, the immediate question this brings up is what features a fossil would need in order for them to accept it as being transitional. Reading between the lines of the creationist argument, what they are really saying is that no matter what a fossil looks like they will never accept it as being evidence for evolution. I think it is helpful if a creationist puts that on the table to begin with. At that point, you are speaking to the audience who may be listening and not necessarily to an individual person.
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