How do you literal YECer's defend your position in light of such overwhelming evidence to the contrary...?
How can you just dismiss the fossil record? Did God create the fossil record in order to intentionally deceive us, or what?
How do explain against all the evidence that shows that we have been, and will be, here, much longer than just "thousands" of years...
Who gave you the monopoly saying that literal truth, is the only truth there is?
Was Jesus trying to teach literal truths, when he spoke in parables, (if it could have been explained literally, then you think he would have just explained it literally by just outright telling them, what Heaven or God the Father, or the kingdom of God IS...
The truth was is that there was no way to explain these things by literal means, so, some other kind of truth must be trying to get conveyed here, don't ya think?
I love you guys, but you guys are ridiculous to me... I'm a theistic evolutionist, so...
Comments?
God Bless!
Hi neogaia,
Let's define the issue just a bit more specifically. No one denies that there are fossils found in rock formations. Generally sedimentary rock. No one denies that the fossil forms are replicas of creatures that existed quite a long time ago and have been preserved for quite a long time. The issue is in the dating of such found forms. Let's consider how a fossil is formed. A creature dies and when it dies it falls to the ground and lays there. Dead creatures don't burrow their way into rocks. Nor do living creatures and then die. This form lays on the surface until the natural processes of wind and waves and other flesh eating creatures destroy all but the skeletal remains. Now, I live in South Carolina and there are bugs and creatures that die around my property all the time. Oddly enough I don't dig 6 inches into the ground and find hundreds of thousands of dead creature forms or rocks that contain those who died maybe a hundred years ago. I find that even the skeletal remains of dead creatures are completely decomposed in a matter of 50-100 years for large boned creatures. Smaller boned or exoskeletal creatures decompose much faster. Of course, man can delay these times using various methods to entomb a body. If a body is kept free of the natural processes of the earth by being entombed in an enclosure that makes it water tight and keeps bugs and such away from the body, then the skeletal parts can be preserved for quite some time.
Now, how are the rocky sediments formed in which these creatures are found? Generally, new sedimentary rock formations take centuries to form and require some fairly great amount of weight pressing down from above it to get the sands and silica of sedimentary rock to harden and become like rock. Question: How does a previously living creature become entombed in sedimentary rock that takes longer to form than the remains of the creature will last?
The sea bed is not covered with literally millions of thousand year old fish and crab and soft or hard shelled sea creatures. Why not? Surely millions of them have died over the last few thousand years. Because the natural processes of decay completely obliterate each creature form in a fairly short time. The earth is not covered with carcasses of animals although millions of animals have died just out in the open and remained where they fell. Why not?
The answer, my friend, is that fossilization takes a special set of circumstances. The creature must die and fairly quickly be covered by mud or sand or whatever sediment they are found in. The mud or sand or whatever sediment they are found in must also be fairly quickly covered by tons of weight that will press the sediment into a hardened state while the bones of the creature are still intact. Then the bones, naturally decompose, but because the sediment is already in a hardened state, the form of the bone structure remains in the sediment. If this just happens all the time and is just a natural process, then we should find fossilized remains everywhere. If a creature dies and just the natural processes cover that creature with sediment that then becomes hardened that then creates a fossil of the creature, then surely we should find fossils everywhere.
There is only one explanation, from the historical account of the Scriptures, that would explain fossils. The flood. During the period of the flood every creature that moves about the earth died. The earth was covered in water for a very long period of time, about a year, and dirt and sediment would have been coming to rest under those waters by the billions and billions of tons. This would be a perfect scenario for large scale fossil formation. The creatures died and within a year were covered by tons and tons of sediment. Their bones and skeletal structures in fairly perfect form.
But how do we date the fossil? What tools do we have available that we know gives us a real date for when a particular fossil was formed? Well, we don't have the bones or flesh of the creature so we can't date the creature. What we have is the sedimentary rock. So, how do we date the rock?
Rocks are generally dated by three methods. All of which measure some change in the atomic structure of the rock. A change that we believe to be based on certain constants. But what about a rock's make up on the day it was created? Do we know for a fact that a rock, on the day it was created, had none of the constants that we measure already working? When God made Adam, He made him as a fully formed and functioning human being. It is believed that when God made the first chicken, like Adam, it was made fully formed and did not go through the process of egg cracking and chick coming out and growing into the first full grown chicken. He made the first chickens, lions, bears, squirrels, et al. as fully formed and functioning animals, just as He did with Adam. How do we know that this 'full adult' stage was not the same for the rocks and sand and mud that was created on the day that God created the earth? How do we know that if someone with the tools to measure these decay processes or changing processes in rock, on the day that God created the earth, wouldn't have measured certain amounts of decay on the day that the rock was created?
Adam was created a fully formed man. He didn't go through the stages of birth from his mother's womb and suckling at her breast and growing from that baby stage over 20 years to become a full grown man. He was made 20 years old or so based on how we measure the age of humans. How do we find any assurance that the rocks of the earth weren't already made with the appearance of a million or billion year history based on how we measure the age of rocks? We can't! We have absolutely no way of knowing that on the day the earth was created, if a man had had the tools to measure such things as we measure to determine the age of rocks and such, just how old those tools would have told us that rock was even though we knew it to be less than 24 hours old.
So, fossil dating is based on dating the rock formation in which it is found and we have no way of knowing what the supposed age of that rock may have shown on the day that it was created. If we had that information, then yes, we could then extrapolate from the known amount of decay on the day the rock was created from the measurable decay that we find today and using our atomic constants could say how old the rock is. But that's the only way.
All dating methods depend on some set of assumed beginning constants that we have no way of knowing. So yes, we can take a rock today and measure the present decay and then wait 10,000 years and measure that same decay again and, based on the constant decay rate, say that the rock is now 10,000 years older than it was when we first established the base line. But without the base line we're all guessing.
God bless you.
In Christ, Ted
