Comments on: Evolution Exposed 91

By: Steven J. Thompson

Steven J. Thompson — Wed, 23 May 2012 04:59:32 +0000

Sigh. Carbon dating is useless for dates exceeding 100,000 years (and that only for the most sophisticated labs: usually it’s good only to thirty thousand years), and is usually used for dating things from historical times. Extreme ages are determined using, e.g. uranium-thorium, potassium-argon, and other dating methods with longer-lived isotopes than carbon-14. Note that nothing about radiometric dating assumes that the world is ancient; it assumes that decay rates are constant (as they appear to be and as quantum physics implies they ought to be), and if the Earth were really only several thousand years old, radiometric dating should be able to determine this (true, some methods can’t distinguish between a six thousand year old Earth and a million year old Earth — but any of them can tell the difference between a six thousand year old Earth and a 4.55 billion year old Earth). I have in fact heard of mother Earth, though never in a book on evolution or the history of the Earth; I suspect that, as usual, your sources deserve less trust than you repose in them.

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 22 May 2012 21:58:20 +0000

Darwin, old-age Earth, and other areas of science are all enmeshed in the sticky, black tar of evolutionary thinking. It is almost impossible to dissect them. Rocks are dated by their fossils, fossils are dated by the rocks they are found in. Carbon dating and other methods are based on old-age assumptions, and the adage that the present is the key to the past, despite the evidence of past catastrophes, is forced on to whatever is examined in the world. Even the origin of the universe and stars and Earth and life are all tied together by the sticky black tar, and it continues to spread. People call themselves evolutionary psychologists, as if anything useful could ever be ripped out of Darwin’s theory, and eco-people, ‘tree-huggers’ and environmentalists worship Nature as if it is a deity all by itself. Ever heard of Mother Earth? She used evolution to make life. She lives inside trees and plants and animals. Darwin and his pagan theories have infected education, culture, economics and family structure. The deadly poison of evolutionary thinking lies behind Hitler, Stalin and PolPot. The entire system of Bible-rejecting, God-denying is connected to evolution, giving a basis for atheism, nihilism and genocide, abortion and infanticide.
Darwin’s whole theory is a mistake, and his greatest mistake was when he turned his back on the Bible and joined the crowd heading to hell – sure, he got some fame for it, but he’s now in the grave awaiting the resurrection. He won’t be so proud of himself when he looks the Creator in the face.

By: Steven J. Thompson

Steven J. Thompson — Tue, 22 May 2012 01:50:25 +0000

First, Charles Darwin is not the prophet of evolutionary theory; no one ascribes infallibility to him or inerrancy to his writings.

Second, Darwin was wrong if one interprets his statement as a universal, absolute statement, but was right regarding most cases of fossilization: there’s a reason most fossils don’t include soft tissue, why, for example, hordes of ammonite fossils are known but barely a trace of their soft tissue is known. If you attribute soft-tissue fossils to a global flood dumping tons of mud atop fossils, you need to explain why soft-tissue preservation is so very much rarer than hard-tissue preservation.

Layers of rock where extraordinary preservation (often including soft tissue) are called lagerstaetten; geologists have described several different mechanisms by which such layers can form (different mechanisms for different sorts of rock: the Burgess Shale was not laid down by the same processes as the Messel Pit. None of these sites show the sort of violent disintegration of organisms we’d expect from a global hydraulic catastrophe (including, if we take “flood geologists” seriously, massive vulcanism, gigantic earthquakes from warp-speed plate tectonics, etc.).

Oh, and fourth, strictly speaking, you are critiquing old-earth geology, not evolution; there are old-earth creationists who agree with you about evolution but disagree about the age of those jellyfish fossils. Given that Darwin was, by training, a geologist, and that he more or less founded the field of taphonomy (the study of what happens to organisms’ remains after they die), it’s still relevant to bring up his opinions, but again, no one bases his views, on the age of the Earth or the origin of species, on the assumption that Darwin never made mistakes.