Evolutionary Scientists...Why can't we all just get along?

[Papias]

hama wrote:

One issue of particular note is regarding the commonly utilized argument for Evolution..that birds evolved from reptiles.

Here is what we have going on. There are prominent scientists such as Richard Dawkins..and other leading advocates such as Eugenie Scott and company who promote that Archaeoraptorex was a transitional fossil between a reptile and a bird.

However, what we find of a world authority on birds, Alan Feduccia has to say appears to demonstrate something of a quite different nature. He is a world authority on birds from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He states on the Archaeoraptorex find, "Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it's not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of ‘paleobabble’ is going to change that.

Hama, are familiar with the practice of "quote mining"? Quote mining is when someone takes a quote out of context, making it sound like it is saying something else. It's basically lying. I hope you are intelligent enough that if a group consistently lies to you, you'll stop taking them at their word.

The Feduccia quote above is a quote mine that is widely used by creationists to distort Feduccia's (already disproven) view that birds evolved from non-dinosaur reptiles. See what they did to you? They used feduccia's quote to try to argue against bird evolving from reptiles, when no one - not even Feduccia - disputes that. Here is what Feduccia had to say when he found out that creationists were using his quote to lie:

"Creationists are going to distort whatever arguments come up.... Archaeopteryx is half reptile and half bird any way you cut the deck, and so it is a Rosetta stone for evolution, whether it is related to dinosaurs or not. These creationists are confusing an argument about minor details of evolution with the indisputable fact of evolution."


-Dr. Alan Feduccia, February 1, 2003​

For many years, Creation Scientists have been pointing out some problems that Evolutionary advocates have had with

Mostly, creationists have distorted, quote-mined, lied, distracted, cherry-picked data, and tried to confuse the issue. You can see example of all of these (well, in the Feduccia quote they had tricked you with) and at sites like www.talkorigins.org.

one another about issues as simple as transitional fossils..

There are literally hundreds of transitional fossils that show evolution beyond a shadow of a doubt - and that is affirmed by geologists. If you'd like to seriously talk about some of these hundreds, then start a thread on it.

Also, I hope you are aware that there are so many independent lines of evidence proving evolution that even if we had exactly zero fossils, evolution would be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. That included anatomy, biogeography, physiology, genetics, molecular biology, and more. All of these show evolution independently of the others. Your saying they just all happen to have given the same wrong answer by chance?

Evolutionary Scientists...Why can't we all just get along?

Evolutionary Scientists (who include thousands of Christians) would love to get along. Many of them would love to worship with you, and work with you to help support a strong, vibrant, honest, and modern Christianity. It's clear that the constantly dishonest tactics like quote mining and misrepresentation can make it hard to get along. You've answered your own question, even just in your opening post.

Papias

 

[Mallon]

I mean when you actually look at the evidence she looks far more like a chimpanzee then a human.

Phil Senter spent some time actually looking at the evidence, and he came to a very different conclusion. When you look at the details of the skeleton, "Lucy" shares more features in common with humans than with chimps (22 of 36 skeletal characters), which is why Australopithecus is thought to be more closely related to the former. His findings are documented here:

http://www.nabt.org/websites/instit...y_teacher/2010/February 2010/FebABTonline.pdf

Regardless, even from the picture you posted, it's pretty obvious that "Lucy" is morphologically intermediate between chimps and humans, which is what evolution predicts (and special creation doesn't).