Fossil evidence

Let us consider the fossil record.  Evolutionists point at sedimentary rock with fossils in them and say "Hey!, look at that, clearly we have proved evolution!"

Likewise, creationists like to point to the same rocks and say something completely different.
What am I doing?  I am showing evidence that evolution is not possible.  I am not saying you should believe in creation or in God.  I am simply saying evolution is bad science.  I am not defending creationism, I am only attacking evolution.  I would much rather have no theory and say "I don't know" than to believe in a theory merely because everyone else says it is true..

What is a fossil?
A fossil is an imprint made by a dead animal.  The animal itself rotted away a long time ago, and was replaced over time with minerals that hardened there and became part of the rock.  A fossil is formed when a creature (dead or alive) is covered in lots of mud, and quickly.  For a fossil to form, you need a LOT of pressure, and the animal must be covered really quickly.  Why?  Well let us consider what happens when an animal dies normally.  There are no burial parties in the animal kingdom.  If an animal dies, it invariably gets eaten by scavengers of all types.  If it does not get eaten, it lies on the surface of the earth and rots away.  The only way it can become a fossil is if it is covered by mud before it decomposes.  This presents a problem that is difficult to explain, because such mudslides do not happen that often.  And the sheer number of fossils in our rocks are way too numerous for all of them to have been made by localised mudslides.  But let us forget this problem for now, and assume that all dying animals do turn into fossils as a matter of course..

What do we typically find in the fossil record?
Besides the famous dinosours, we find fossils of lots of other animals, insects and plants.  Most of these species are the same or similiar to animals we have today.  Giraffes, hippos, antelope and whatnot.  We find relatively few humans, but they are there. 

What does fossils prove or not prove?
The mere existence of fossils does not prove evolution.  The only thing we can say with any certainty is that the fossil proves that an animal with that likeness was once alive and is now dead. 
What about dinosours?
People often think that the very existence of fossilized dinosour bones are proof of evolution.  Honestly, that is like finding a model T Ford in a scrapyard, and claiming that you have found proof of alien visitations.  Dinosour bones prove that dinosours once lived on earth, and since we don't see many of them around, they are now extinct.  Extinction proves nothing.
 
What do we expect the fossil record to look like if evolution is true?
Evolution teaches that all life evolved.  One species changes to another over millenia.
To take a simple example of the dolphin and whale family.  They say that cattle or pigs slowly changed into these water creatures over some millions of years.  If this is true, we would expect the fossil record to show us some examples of cows that are half dolphin.  In the deeper layers we should find normal cattle.  A bit higher up we should find cattle that have sprouted little bits of fins.  Go another few feet higher and they should have lost their hair.  Go higher still and the nostrils are moving up the head.  Etcetera etcetera..
In fact, we should not find any clearly defined species in the fossil record at all.  We should find a jumble of frankenstein creatures.  Nor should we have clearly defined species today, for that matter.  What do we find in the fossil record?  We find clearly defined species.  cows and sheep and alligators etc.  And interestingly, you could go to South Africa, and find fossils of say a cow, and then go to the USA and find fossils that look exactly the same.  The problem with clearly defined species is what the evolutionists refer to as "the missing link".  This is actually misleading.  They are not missing just one or two links.  They are missing ALL the links.  They are missing whole pieces of chain.  The idea during darwin's time was that in time we will unearth many more fossils and these would show the intermediate species that the theory insists must be there.  Today there exists in museums over 100 MILLION fossils, all identified and documented.  Out of all of these, they can only point to 2 or 3 fossils and claim intermediate species.  And there is a LOT of speculation about the authenticity of those 2 or 3...  (specifically the "archeopteryx")

What about the so-called "living fossils"?
In the 1980's, they caught living coelecanth specimens off the coast of Madagascar.  This is a huge problem again.  They were thought to have died out like 60 million years ago.  Why does the ones we caught now look exactly the same as the fossilized version?  in 60 million years it should have improved?

Creation by Evolution?

A large number of people say they believe in God, but a large number of people believe in evolution too.

So there must be a lot of people who believe in both.  Some call it creation by evolution, or "old earth" creationism.   There are many variations to the theme.  

I am going to list some of the claims.   Not all of these claims are held by all of the "creation by evolution" proponents.

*  The process of evolution has been guided by the hand of God. 

*  Genesis should not be taken literally, while insisting that the bible is the inspired word of God. 

*  The 6 creation days in Genesis should be read as 6 periods, each of which could be millions of years.

*  There is a mysterious time gap of billions of years between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.  The extinct dinosaurs are said to have lived in the period described by Gen 1:1 or in the gap in-between the two verses. 

I believe this is an attempt by Christians to reconcile their faith to what they perceive as the scientific truth.  It is an effort to find a middle ground that will offend neither their faith nor their intelligence. As I will show, there are serious problems with this.  I need to quote from the bible.  The reason I do this is because the believers of this theory also profess to have faith in the validity of the bible as inspired text.  I am not using the bible to prove creation, I am using it to prove the unworkability of a "creation by evolution" theory..

Literary style in Genesis

The book of genesis in its entirety is written as a historical book.  Why the first chapter or two should all of a sudden be taken with a pinch of salt is nonsensical.  In the first chapter, the bible speaks of "It was evening, and it was morning, the second day".  Why did the writer write it in just that way?  I believe the writer tried to remove any possibility that the reader could misunderstand what he was trying to say.  He did not simply speak of 6 days.  He spoke of six days, each specifically separated by a night.  Think about it.  Moses (the assumed writer) did not have the concept of 24 hours back then.  How else was he supposed to write this part to try and make sure you do not take it for anything other than a literal 24hour period?

Unworkability of 6 long periods

Plants and vegetables were made on the second day.  The sun was only made on the third day.  If the days are separated by millions of years, how did the plants manage to grow?  If stellar evolution forms part of the theory, how could the sun have been created after the earth?  - on day 3? 

Genesis specifically excludes evolution

Genesis speaks of creating creatures "according to their kinds".  They were specifically made separate as separate species.  If evolution was there, why would the bible not say so?  (Since it is Inspired and all)

Where do you draw the line?

If some parts of the bible are not quite true, or should be read as if its merely a book of ideas, where do you draw the line?  If those parts of the bible that do not quite agree with you can be edited out, then you should rather drop it totally and burn your bible.  Or man up and believe the whole thing.

It is clear (to me) that either the entire Genesis 1 is a fairy tale, or it is all true.  There is no in-between.

Of course I will present a lot of evidence that shows evolution is impossible.  I will also show some evidence that shows a 6000-year old earth is impossible..  In my opinion, there is more evidence against evolution that against creation, but we will all make up our own minds based on the evidence we see and the weight we each decide to assign to each piece of evidence.. 

Creation in a nutshell

OK here we go with the other end of the story.

Before six thousand years ago, there was Nothing.  Only God.

He was probably lonely and decided to work for a week.  He made the universe and the earth and all living things in 6 days.  Some christians like to call this 6 "periods of time" and try to connect each period to a few billion years or so.  Those christians need to make up their minds.  Either the bible is true or it's not. 

Anyway..

He made all of these things, and to cap it all He made Adam and later also Eve.  All the humans on earth today come from those two.  Some 1500 years or so after creation week, there was this dude called Noah who got it into his head to build a helluva boat and somehow he managed to fit a bunch of animals in there and they lived in there for a year or 3.  Noah, his 3 sons, and a wife for each were the only humans to survive.  All people alive today come from those people, and all the animals came from those animals.  Except the fish of course.

Why do people believe in such a fairy tale?

The problem with proof is that none of us alive were present at the big bang or at God;s "light bulb moment".  We cannot hit the rewind button and check the slow-motion replay.  The scientific method thus becomes difficult to apply.  We as scientists are forced to play the role of crime scene investigators.  We look at the scene of the crime, searching for clues, ignoring our own personal ideas of what may have happened.  We focus on hard physical evidence.  In the end we build a case for one of the two suspects, based on the clues we find.  We may find some pieces of evidence that appears to disprove creation, and we may find some other pieces of evidence that appears to disprove evolution.  The mere existence of evidence does not close the case.  In the end it comes down to each of us in our own hearts.  We look at the cases presented, and we weigh the evidence as fairly as we can.  And we respect those who came to a different conclusion.  As long as that conclusion is based on a scientific opinion as opposed to a belief system.

Evolution in a nutshell

So what is the evolution argument?

I am an engineer, nor a paleontologist or a geologist, so please bear with me..  At times I may oversimplify and the tone may be a bit condescending.  This is not the intention.  I am just trying to make the subject a bit more fun.  Promise I will do the same to the creation account!

A LONG time ago (many billions), there was a singularity.  A small speck of dust with almost infinite density.  At some point the spec had one hell of a headache and exploded in a Big Bang.  Matter was ejected from this central point at extreme speeds in all directions.  At this point all the matter was in the form of hydrogen: the smallest, most basic element.  Along the way, some of the hydrogen clumped together, somehow forming stars where a the hydrogen was squeezed real hard to form some more useful elements.  These elements became planets and comets and the other cool stuff we see in the sky.

At one point, the earth happened as a big blob of molten rock (not exactly sure how), orbiting a smallish star we call the sun.  The blob took some millions of years to cool down.  Luckily there was water on the planet, some say it came from a comet.  After the molten rock cooled down enough to allow water in its liquid state, it rained on the planet off and on for some time.  (Lets say some millions of years).  The water made oceans and lakes.  At some point in time, there happened to form a pool of water that had just the right chemical components nicely suspended in the water (a chemical soup, if you will).  A bolt of lightning or something hit the water, jolting the soup in just the right way (not unlike the jumper cables they use to shock a dead guy on hospital TV shows).  Life started! 

This first soupy critter was pretty basic stuff as life goes.  I mean a moment ago it was only soup.  Amazingly, right from that first moment of critterdom, it was complex enough to copy itself.  Pretty amazing soup.  Of course this is as improbable as anything ever was, but then again we have had LOTS of time for this to happen.  Over a period of more billions of years, these little critters were copying themselves, humping like crazy, making babies and filling the earth.  

Every now and then, the copy process got screwed up just a little.  Call it a typo.  Clever guys insist on calling it "genetic mutation".  Of course most of these copy errors result in dead, useless or infertile critters, but it just so happens that these critters were humping for billions of years, and along the way, some of these typos were bound to result in a critter that was by pure chance actually fitter, faster, or cuter than its boring single-celled parents.  Sort of like when typing a few random characters while copying your buddy's homework is bound to eventually get you a better result than your buddy, if you do it billions of times.  

The faster and better critters probably chose each other as humping partners, since the rest of the single-celled dating pool was just too dull.  (Yes I realise that single-celled organisms do not have gender and they do not hump, but the story is way cooler this way..  )

Anyway, copy errors that resulted in better critters tended to stick around from one generation to the next, while the not-so-lucky copy errors tended to go nowhere and die.  As the critters tended to spread out across different environments and climates, they changed and improved in different ways, to better suit their surroundings, giving us different species.  In the space of another billion years or so, life on the rock became way more complex, and we have millions of different types of critters all over the show.  One particular group of apes tended to fare particularly well, and at some point, they became just a little more clever than the rest.  Slowly but surely their copy errors resulted in what we today call Homo Sapiens.  This was a couple hundred thousand years ago.  Some say that since then not much has changed for us.  For some reason we were now so perfect that no copy error could improve us any more, and our improvement grinded to a halt. 

That's more or less the story.  Comic-book style.  There are some variations on some of the points.  We did not discuss the more interesting points of darwinism vs neo-darwinism and a few others.  But most experts will agree that the gist of my story is sort of accurate, if a bit simplistic..

Comments?

Next up is the creation story..

Thereafter the real fun begins..

Evolution on trial

An evocative post title.  A bit misleading perhaps.

This is my first post and I cannot start it with a boring title.

To get to a scientifically defendable opinion of the subject matter, we should discard all faith-based assumptions.  I cannot convince you of the existence of God by quoting from the Good Book.  So instead we discard all arguments of whether or not God exists, whether or not Evolution of Genesis may be true.  If we want to be truly scientific about it, we cannot entertain a preconceived idea of the answer before asking the question..

So how do we go about this?

After forgetting our preconceptions, we look at the evidence, and apply science and reason.  Science provides a tool to objectively question what we see around us.  The answers to those questions can be called results, and those results enable us to form a theory.  What exactly is a theory?  Wikipedia says:

 

A supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, esp. one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained

We could say a theory is an idea we conceive to try and explain the facts as we have perceived them.  If I see a car going uphill at 60mph, I have proof that something is imparting energy to it, or else it would not move uphill according to natural laws.  I can further notice it has an exhaust pipe and fuel cap, and develop a theory that the car is powered by gasoline.

At what point does a theory graduate to scientific fact?

When enough clever people believe it to be true?

When it is the only answer we find acceptable?

No, the theory becomes fact when it is conclusively proven to be true.  When there exists no possibility whatsoever that it is false.  How do we prove a theory as true?  Typically, the theory can be tested by inventing a scientific experiment to verify some or other expected outcome of the theory. 

If our theory postulates the car is running on gas, we could open the filler cap and take a sample of the tank contents.  We analyze the sample, and it turns out to be gasoline.  What does this tell us? - it tells us there is gasoline in a hollow container in the back of the vehicle.  It does not necessarily prove the car requires gasoline to run..  But it does increase the probability that the theory may be true.  If we siphoned off the gasoline, and the car refuses to go, we have proved that it will not work unless there is gasoline in the tank.  We can then work it from another angle and put a known amount of gasoline in, verify the car is running, and then maybe measure the distance it will go before the gas runs out.  To be 100% sure we could fill the tank with water and verify the car does not work.  At this point, we could graduate the theory to fact and say the car does indeed run on gasoline.  (As opposed to I "believe" the car runs on gasoline)

In following posts I will briefly define the two opposing theories (creation vs evolution) as I see them (without commenting on the validity of either side)  Thereafter we can objectively look at some evidence..

Lets have some fun!

All comments will be published...  I will only be able to answer one or two questions at a time though..