Asha'man

Um, perhaps this is just wording, but aren't all fossils, and all existing animals, transitional forms? Natural selection is always providing some pressure to adapt or die. (except perhaps in humans, where we protect our weak, and even encourage them to breed)

The only real question is of time: How long before this species is extinct? Will it be followed by a derivative species? Will this species last for a million years or for 60 million?

Jack the Bodiless

Again, the actual evidence shows exactly the opposite. All coal and oil deposits are under dry land or shallow coastal waters, not the ocean floor, which has never been dry land and contains no trace of land animals or plants. There never was significantly more habitable area, just the continental shelves during Ice Ages and suchlike. You have obviously never heard of Plate Tectonics either. And yet it is real. Ever heard of the San Andreas Fault? The Mid-Atlantic Ridge? The Marianas Trench? The measurable movement of continents and the ongoing widening of the Atlantic Ocean? The formation of the Himalayas?
It cannot be done. No creationist has ever succeeded. There are simply too many obvious intermediates between humans and (earlier) apes.
Bzzt! Wrong answer! Each breed came from an animal that was almost identical, nobody can definitively say "this is a (whatever), but the parents were not".
And a Chihuahua is a dog, and a human is an ape. Get used to it. Would you say that African elephants and Indian elephants are both elephants? We are more closely related to chimps than those elephants are to each other.

Coragyps

You Betcha said:
Before, there was much more habitable area and much more plant life. The evidence is the amount of coal and oil.

A large majority of all petroleum has its origin in shallow ocean environments, not on land. Evidence is not only from geological setting, but from the chemical makeup of the oil itself and the fact that most formation water is altered seawater. There is also far too much oil and coal in the ground to have formed from the detritus of 6000, or 60,000, years of life. Try again.

DB_Hunter

Absolutely. It's a very simple concept that creationists cannot comprehend - that no species is an end in an of themselves, but just another step towards another species. Usually, even extinct lines have related branches that then evolve into others...

I think that basic point it that creationists don't like the idea that humans aren't the end-all, be-all of life - that we aren't the "pinnacle of creation." In their eyes, humans are the top, the best that life has to offer in the universe. Once you take away thay mystique, their entire house of ideals collapses. They've built their entire worldview on a foundation of supposed species superiority (and finality), and when that is taken from them, they don't know how to react.

And so, just like the inmates at the zoo's monkey house (a family line they refuse to aknowledge, yet tend to resemble quite a bit), they create crap and then fling it at us.

DB

Additional: Thinking about the monkeyhouse metaphor made another connection: there's quite a bit of "mental masterbation" required in apologetics... The rest of us know that's it's laughable at best (and completely false or dangerous at worst), but maybe being stuck in such a limiting field forces one to "relieve" boredom, on one way or another.

Someone hand You Betcha a kleenex...

[ January 03, 2002: Message edited by: DB_Hunter ]</p>

theyeti

Since you seem to be in complete denial of Earth history, and will thus not accept the fossil record as valid evidence, I'm going to direct you to the thead <a href="http://ii-f.ws/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=3&t=001513" target="_blank">Questions for "In His Name"</a> which I will be bumping for your enjoyment.

You need to answer the questions there and see if you can defend the young Earth and flood geology first.

theyeti

Imhotehp

2 reasons why creation is not to be taken seriously.

1)The genesis contradiction.
The accounts in the creation story are contradictory. In genesis 1 the order is as follows:

• Heaven
• earth
• plants
• animals
• man

But in Genesis 2:4, the order is rearranged. We are told that adam came before all of the plants and animals and it happened on one day, not six.

The story itself is contradictory, making a literal interpretation impossible.

2)The universe
The depictions of our surrounding universe in the bible contradict direct observation. In the bible we are told the earth is flat(from Is.11:12 Ezekiel 7:2, Daniel 2:35, Mt.4:5-8, Rev. 7:1) but we know, from observation, it is round. We are told the sun revolves around it (from Joshua 10:12, Psalms 19:4-5, Is. 13:10, Habukkuk 3:11)
But, again through observation, we know the sun is stationary. We are told the stars which lie in the firmament a few miles above the earth are all their is of the universe(Mt. 24:29) but again through observation we know that start are actually lightyears away from earth the universe is host to other phenomenon that aren't even mentioned in the bible.

I submit that if the god of the bible created the universe than it would consist of a stationary flat earth, a star that revolves around it and a few other stars in the firmament. This is clearly not the case.

Biblical creation contradicts both itself and direct observation. The "evidence" supporting it is purely anecdotal and that alone disqualifies it as a scientific theory, since anecdotal evidence, in the arena of science, isn't acceptable at all.

Even if we let that slide, it clealy cannot stand up against scientific scrutiny, so it again fails to be a reliable, testable proveable, scientific theory.

Daggah

Since apes and humans are so clearly different, one would expect that you (or even "educated" - haha - creationists) should not have any difficulty telling a set of ape skulls apart from a set of human skulls.

<ol type="1">[*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [*] [/list=a]

There are others, but there's usually an 8 image limit on forums like these.

In any case, the point of this is just this:

If creationism is true, then every organism was created independently of every other, and similarities between them are only coincidental. It should be a trivial matter to separate the fossils of human "kinds" from those of ape "kinds." However, if evolution is true, then every organism has an ancestor from which it inherited some of its features - skull structure, for example - and because of this, it can be difficult to categorize skull fossils like these as "ape" or "human."

Which of these do you think are human fossils, and which do you think are ape fossils?

Let's see if your predictions match those of other creationists. Heck, we'll see soon whether the creationists can even agree amongst themselves!

You Betcha

What do you consider an ancestor of turtles? Something that is not a turtle? What was the common ancestor for turtles and other reptiles, bacteria?

All you provided were different kinds of turtles. If I am incorrect, please show me.

Show me the fossils of the ancestors of turtles. The previous examples were merely turtles as we have always known them.

Turtles are turtles, humans are humans, dogs are dogs, and apes are apes. There are many different sorts of each of these creatures, but they are still what they are and cannot produce anything else except what they are. That is a scientific fact.

[ January 03, 2002: Message edited by: You Betcha ]</p>

hyzer

Dear Mr. You Betcha:

You seem so smart. You know all about oil and coal and turtles and floods. I want to learn too! Tell me, where I can go to learn what you know?

Thanks,

Hyzer

P.S. I really want to know!

CodeMason

You have never even heard of something, but you still feel you have the authority to speak on the matter?

And, define "ape". Define "human". I won't be surprised when you can't. Your conception of animals does not extend past that of a preschooler, "A kittie's a kittie and a duck's a duck."