Question: As a creationist, how can you recognize a transitional fossil? Answer: when creationists can't agree which "kind" the specimen belongs to. [Spirituality & Religion]
A transitional fossil should show features which belong to the ancestral group and features which belong to the descendant group. Creationists necessarily deny that these fossils exist but they expose the lie in their own argument when between them they cannot agree which "kind" a given fossils belongs in. Is an Archaeopteryx a bird kind or a dinosaur kind? It has a mosaic of characteristics which makes it both. Where do we draw the line between human kind and ape kind?
Well creationists just can't agree with each other which proves the fact that their features are so mosaic that they do indeed represent a transitional form between "kinds".
I am not a creationist. But I once heard a prominent televangelist give his explanation for fossil evidence or carbon dating evidence: it was created by Satan to mislead people into rejecting the Bible.
It is impossible to debate with creationists, conspiracy theorists, or delusional psychiatric patients, because they all have a superpower that you don't have: they can alter reality by their words. No evidence-based argument is any match for that.
@Pikachu I can't take credit for that thought. It's what G.K. Chesterton wrote in one of his books in the early 20th century. He was saying that it is a mistake to describe an insane person as having "lost his mind." He would argue that an insane person has only his mind -- and thus can refute whatever evidence you use to confront his delusions. He has his mind but has lost his humanity (as far as his delusions are concerned, that is.)
He goes on to say that one sign of sanity is the ability to hold contradictory ideas in tension with one another. An insane person must eliminate one of the two ideas in order to be purely, and perhaps cold-heartedly, logically consistent.
@GodSpeed63 A transitional form is an organism that has features intermediate of its ancestors and progeny. It鈥檚 important to note that the term describes the features of populations rather than individuals.
@GodSpeed63 Sorry, you're not gonna flip this back on me. You made an asinine comment that displayed zero understanding of the term "transitional fossil" and were challenged to prove you had the faintest clue what you were talking about. Until you answer that challenge, I'm under no obligation to do your homework for you.
Question: why do evolutions who obviously know nothing about Paleontology always use fossils as an argument?
the "geological column" has been disproven time and time again, what layer of sediment or how deep a fossil is found is not a scientific method to determine its age; nor do the differential between layers of sediment span thousands/millions of years as is often claimed
the only thing that can be determined from a fossil is that whatever it was died, nothing more. there is information about when or how it died, no record of who or what it's heritage/ancestry is.
Similar "features" don't prove transition/evolution, it only proves similar design.
Evolutions claim that dinosaurs predate man by millions of years, yet there have been several instances of dinosaur fossils & footprints being discovered alongside man sized/human footprints. So much for that "transition" between ape and man... 馃
[quote]the "geological column" has been disproven time and time again[/quote]
It has not. It has been confirmed all over the world to the point that even creationist bastions like Answers in Genesis are forced accept that the geological column is as it is but they attempt to make excuses for it. For example: nowhere on the entire planet has there been discovered a rabbit or a cat or a dolphin in the same geological layer as a trilobite or a mosasaur or a T. Rex. Just doesn't happen. Even Ken Ham, Kent Hovind and Ray Comfort will tell you that.
[quote]what layer of sediment or how deep a fossil is found is not a scientific method to determine its age[/quote]
It is when it is cross-referenced and corroborate by independent dating methods including dendrochronology and radiometric dating. And since i know you're already leaping there, we're not talking only about radio carbon dating but many independent radioactive isotopes that all converge on the same dates. If you'd like to bring up the common creationist anomalies i'm happy to explain those for you.
[quote]no record of who or what it's heritage/ancestry is.[/quote]
Well that's not true. Fossils tell us a lot about how an animal lived, how it died, what it survived, what it ate and [i]especially[/i] about its ancestry. And the way we do that is using the same science that you already agree with: Taxonomy. We group animals together based on physical traits. This is the same process applied to determining relatedness.
[quote]Similar "features" don't prove transition/evolution, it only proves similar design.[/quote]
They don't "prove" anything either way but the similarities are far more coherently explained by common ancestry than special creation. The examples are endless. Why does a squirrel have the same bones in its hands as a whale? Why does a toothless anteater have genes for teeth? Why, in utero, do humans go through a stage where they have fish gills and a yolk sack?
Because an omnipotent being has the same limitations as a human inventor? Or because they share common ancestry?
[quote] yet there have been several instances of dinosaur fossils & footprints being discovered alongside man sized/human footprints[/quote]
Nope. You're thinking of the Paluxy River footprints and they have been thoroughly debunked. I can either explain to you how or i can link you to a lovely video detailing the obvious mistakes made by the people claiming them as human. Short version: The "human prints" are not anatomically human footprints but vaguely human looking impressions caused by the weathering of theropod dinosaur prints. When the dinosaur toe imprints weather away, it lives the rest of the dinosaur print looking vaguely human. The "human" prints occur only in the same places as the dinosaur prints and with the same gait but notably also only occur sporadically...almost as if some prints were weathered into that shape while others were better preserved....
[quote]So much for that "transition" between ape and man...[/quote]
lol we have literally not even touched on that nor have you actually responded to the problem i raised in the OP. I'd love for you to respond the things i've mentioned here but i don't blame you if you don't. That was a wall of text and a bunch of (likely) new information. But i hope you'll at least give it a read and maybe investigate some of it for yourself. If you're interested i have some very good videos about taxonomy, phylogeny and radiometric dating which are really accessible to layman like you and me.
There was a great video that @deadgerbil once posted about the evolutionary of dinosaurs into Birds and they said all birds had a single ancestor and it wasn't the Archaeopteryx
@Straylight lol some of them. But i think a lot of them just believe when they hear other creationists say something has been debunked and don't investigate beyond that. Case in point: a fellow in here has just brought up the Paluxy river tracks as proof that humans and dinosaurs lived together.
...that eat their own shit?馃 lol I mean, i've heard that cliched joke by creationists about believing one's ancestors were apes a thousand times but the addition of eating shit says more about you than me...
Gotta say, i was hoping for a bit more back and forth on the the claims you made and the rebuttal i gave but am i correct in assuming that this is all you're prepared to respond with?
So much for the notion that "evolutionists" are the ones who don't understand the fossil record馃ぃ
@CopperCicada Because belief in creationism is one thing. Stealing the legitimacy of science when it suits and spitting on it when it doesn't is another and it's not something i accept. So i shine a light on it.
@CopperCicada Yeah you'll find i never actually argue that god didn't create life, just that it evidently evolved. But some faithful find even that concession to be heresy.
