Posts Tagged ‘fossil’

Evidence From The Fossil Record

September 12th, 2009

diatom A microscopic sea creature known as a diatom has a shell which does not decompose when it dies. Instead, the shells gradually accumulate on the ocean bottom; and under just the right conditions they form deposits called diatomaceous earth. Such deposits have been found hundreds of feet thick and can be remarkably free of other contaminants. The existence of these deposits seemed a dilemma for young-earth creationists, because it was not believed that such thick deposits could form rapidly.

A 1976 discovery confirmed that rapid formation of thick diatomaceous earth deposits are possible. At a diatomaceous earth quarry in Lompoc, California, workers of the Dicalite Division of Grefco Corporation uncovered the fossil skeleton of a The Humpback Whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) is a baleen whale.The Humpback Whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) is a baleen whale. This fossil is about eighty feet long. Billions of the tiny diatom shells could not have gradually buried the skeleton over millions of years, because the skeleton would not have lasted that long. Dead ocean creatures do not become fossils, because they rot and even their bones disintegrate. In order for a fossil the size of this whale to form, it would have to be buried deeply and quickly. Only quick burial could have sealed the remains from the effects of atmosphere, bacteria, and scavengers. The formation containing this whale fossil had to have been deposited quickly. The better scientists understand the fossil record, the more reasons they have to believe in a worldwide flood and to abandon the old-earth theory.

The above document is from It’s a Young World After All, p.81-83 as quoted in A Closer Look At The Evidence by Richard & Tina Kleiss.

“This is what the LORD says, he who made the earth, the LORD who formed it and established it–the LORD is his name: ‘Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.’ ”(Jeremiah 33:2-3)

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Dr. Colin Patterson

August 2nd, 2009

robert2 

On November 5, 1981, the late  Colin Patterson (who at the time was the senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History in London, the editor of the professional journal published by the museum, and one of the world’s foremost fossil experts) delivered a public address to his evolutionist colleagues at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In his speech, Dr. Patterson astonished those colleagues when he stated that he had been “kicking around” non-evolutionary, or “anti-evolutionary,” ideas for about eighteen months. As he went on to describe it:

One morning I woke up and something had happened in the night, and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it. That’s quite a shock to learn that one can be misled so long. Either there was something wrong with me, or there was something wrong with evolution theory (1981).

Dr. Patterson said he knew there was nothing wrong with him, so he started asking various individuals and groups a simple question: “Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History, and the only answer I got was silence.” He tried it on the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar at the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all he got there “was silence for a long time and eventually one person said, ‘I do know one thing—it ought not to be taught in high school.’ ” He then remarked, “It does seem that the level of knowledge about evolution is remarkably shallow. We know it ought not to be taught in high school, and that’s all we know about it.”

Dr. Patterson went on to say: “Then I woke up and realized that all my life I had been duped into taking evolution as revealed truth in some way.” But more important, he termed evolution an “anti-theory” that produced “anti-knowledge.” He also suggested that “the explanatory value of the hypothesis is nil,” and that evolution theory is “a void that has the function of knowledge but conveys none.” To use Patterson’s wording, “I feel that the effects of hypotheses of common ancestry in systematics has not been merely boring, not just a lack of knowledge, I think it has been positively anti-knowledge” (1981; cf. Bethell, 1985, 270:49-52,56-58,60-61).

Dr. Patterson made it clear, as I wish to do here, that he had no fondness for the creationist position. Yet he did refer to his stance as “anti-evolutionary,” which was quite a change for a man who had authored several books (one of which was titled simply Evolution) in the field that he later acknowledged was capable of producing only “anti-knowledge.”

The above article was taken out of an article published in the Apologetics Press :: Sensible Science 

Is Evolution a “Fact” of Science?

by Bert Thompson, Ph.D.