It's really funny to read the ramblings of evolution promoters like S.J. Gould and R. Dawkins when they slyly admit that the expected predominance of transitional forms has not materialized as had been thought they would, and we are left with "a precious few..." But they can't manage to identify a single one of these precious few! The reason is, they are ALL hotly contested and none of them are in any way convincing, while numerous others have turned out to be outright frauds.
The only thing that is "evolving" is the theory itself!
Intelligent children want nothing to do with the silliness of evolution.
Evolution is a fairy tale for grown-ups.
The OP has a lot of great points. Today's students of science have a lot of challenge and opportunity to sift out the honest truth from the lurid fiction, since several generations of charlatans have mixed it all up. There is a lot of work to be done.
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You say there is a lot of work to be done. show us your work.
Uniformitarianism (long-earth-ages)Once they conjured up a ‘natural’ explanation for the existence of a spinning/orbiting earth they then had to try to explain the topography of the earth, the physical structure of the surface of the earth as we find it today. History records it was Charles Lyell (1797-1875), Adam Sedgwick, Sir Roderick Murchison and many other like-minded men of The Geological Society of London - founded in 1807 - that ‘solved’ this problem. He/they proposed that slow processes acting over long periods of time formed everything, including sedimentary rock, with each of its layers representing its own age of millions of years. In his book
The Rise of the Evolution Fraud, (Malcolm Bowden: The Rise of the Evolution Fraud, Creation-Life Publishers, San Diego, California, 1982) Malcolm Boden quotes an 1830 letter from Lyell to one Poulette Scrope - who was about to review the first volume of Lyell’s The Principles of Geology, a thesis on uniformitarianism for rocks - saying ‘I am sure you may get into Quarterly Review what will free science from Moses.’ Boden goes further and presents a record of this geological and biblical revolution, one exactly similar to the heliocentric fraud wherein assumptions and theories were upheld as empirical probabilities and facts by powerful men who filled the important ‘scientific’ administrations in universities and teaching institutions and who in turn ensured the uniform method was placed in all textbooks since that time.
‘Uniformitarianism is the assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. It has included the gradualistic concept that “the present is the key to the past” and is functioning at the same rate. Uniformitarianism has been a key principle of geology and virtually all fields of science, but naturalism’s modern geologists, while accepting that geology has occurred across deep time, no longer hold to a strict gradualism. Uniformitarianism was formulated by British naturalists in the late 18th century, starting with the work of the geologist James Hutton, which was refined by John Playfair and popularised by Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology in 1830. The term uniformitarianism was coined by William Whewell, who also coined the term catastrophism for the idea that Earth was shaped by a series of sudden, short-lived, violent events.’ ---Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.
Up until the Copernican revolution the world was aged according to the Holy Scriptures (6,000 to 10,000 years-old). Here is a more precise account.
‘The year from the creation of the world, when in the beginning God created heaven and earth, five thousand one hundred and ninety nine: From the Deluge, the year two thousand nine hundred and fifty seven: from the birth of Abraham, the year two thousand and fifteen…’ The above composition belongs to Roman Martyrology first published in 1583 by Pope Gregory XIII, the pope who decreed the revision of the Julian calendar. At the office of the prime, in cathedral chapters and monasteries, the announcement of the following day’s feast [Christmas day] was made with unusual solemnity. The Lector, who frequently is one of the dignitaries of the choir, sung, to a magnificent chant, the above lesson from the martyrology. On that day alone, and on that single occasion, did the Church adopt the Septuagint chronology, according to which the birth of the Saviour took place five thousand years after the Creation; whereas the Vulgate version, and the Hebrew text, places only four thousand years between the two events.
New Translation: ‘unknown ages from the time when God created the heavens and the earth and then formed man and woman in his own image.’ --- USCCB Translation (Committee on the Liturgy, 1994.)
Noah’s Flood and JonahWe now come to the consequences of the loss of faith in geocentrism, having to accept further changes to the literal interpretations held by all but one of the Fathers,(The only Church Father known to have adopted the view that the Flood was a local event seems to have been Pseudo-Justin (identified by some with Theodoret of Cyrus, c. 393–457).) this time the universality of Noah’s Flood and the theology based on it. Tradition taught that the whole earth was flooded by the Deluge and all but eight persons were drowned as a punishment for a world of sin. The Ark thus became a divine type of the Catholic Church, the only way to eternal salvation. Indeed even the design of the Ark with its only door placed in its side represented the spear-wound of Christ from which his blood save the human race and opened up the life in heaven to those who believed in him. Thus the Ark became an allegory of the dogma ‘no salvation outside the Church.’
‘St Augustine rejected the allegorical interpretations of the Flood account by commentators who supposed “that there could not be a flood so great that the water should rise fifteen cubits above the highest mountains.”’ --- City of God 15.27.
In his defence of Galileoism in his 1913 book Galileo and his Condemnation, the Jesuit Fr Hull gives us a demonstration of the propaganda used and the history of how the Earthmovers made the Bible conform to the fraud of the heliocentrists and the uniformitarians:
‘Down to a generation or two ago it was the general belief of Christians that the deluge of Noah covered the whole earth, and that it is so described in the most explicit terms in the Bible. Certain new considerations, mainly drawn from geology, led specialists to the contrary conclusion that the deluge was by no means universal, but was a comparatively local phenomenon; widespread enough to cover the area occupied by mankind at that time, but not much more. This view at first found considerable opposition in theological circles; partly because the restriction of the area of the flood was not as yet demonstrated beyond question, and partly because it ran counter to the literal text of the Scripture as universally understood by its interpreters. Fortunately, the view did not attain such sudden publicity as to cause a widespread sensation, and so no crisis arose. The partial-deluge-view gradually came to look more and more feasible, and the possibility of interpreting Scripture accordingly became more and more evident. The new view gradually filtered down from learned circles to the man in the street, so that nowadays the partiality of the deluge is a matter of commonplace knowledge among all educated Christians, and is even taught to the rising generation in elementary schools.’ ---- Fr Ernest R. Hull, S. J: Galileo and his Condemnation, p.71.
Witness how Fr Ernest Hull, an ‘educated Christian’ no doubt, places biblical interpretation of Noah’s Flood into the hands of ‘specialists’ in geology. Today, 100 years later, Noah’s flood is depicted in a Catholic Bible like so:
‘Deluge. The great flood which covered the whole land or region in which Noe lived (Gen. 6:1-9:19). God sent this flood to destroy all men in this region because of their wickedness. Noe and his family alone were spared (Gen. 6:1-8). Scriptural scholars say that the flood did not necessarily cover the whole earth as we know it today; some even hold that it not necessarily destroys all the people on the earth.’ ---The Holy Bible: The Catholic Press Inc. Chicago.
What then is all that about in Genesis with God telling Noah to build a huge Ark over many years, filling it up with animals and birds of all sorts and having to spend a year afloat on a ‘lake’ when he and his family could have gone on holiday with horse and cart and enjoyed themselves with all those others saved outside the ‘region.’ So much for ‘no salvation outside the Ark (the Catholic Church)?’ The hierarchy in Rome, having sterilised biblical exegesis and hermeneutics with their Galilean U-turn, went along with other U-turns that were making Genesis look like a compilation of fairy tales and myths.
Guy BerthaultAs an anecdote to the above let us bring ourselves up to date on this subject of uniformitarianism (long-ages) based on the research by the French geologist-sedimentologist Guy Berthault. Experiments conducted by this man at the University of Colorado between 1985 and 1990 have shattered all conceived ideas that sediments were laid down one layer on top of another throughout the ages. (Geological Society of France’s Journal, October 1993.) In fact he found sediments are laid down in a sideways motion, thus in fact the bottom strata in any one deposit, always considered the oldest according to Lyell, can well be younger than the top strata further back along the path of any deposit. This evidence, after confirmed and valid tests, means animal fossils in one stratum at or near the surface can well be buried longer than fossils in the lower strata, thus shattering the whole ‘fossil-column’ assertions of the evolutionists. In other words fossils found at the bottom of a ravine, may well be younger than a fossil found further up the cliff-face. And not only does this falsify Lyell’s ‘scientific’ postulation that the ages of fossils can be classified according to their depth in the rock, but it shows that the radioactive dating used to confirm this false theory is itself manipulated to suit the evolutionists. Other discoveries, such as radioactive halos left behind by decaying radioactive elements in the ‘Precambrian granites’, and in coal, (R. V. Gentry, Creation’s Tiny Mystery, Earth Sciences Association, Tennessee, 1986.) and that two hundred year old lava rock has been dated at three million years old, provide empirical evidence that falsifies the theories from the Big Bang to the great uniformitarian hoax. Berthault’s work (Guy Berthault: Principles of geologic dating in question, Fusion, May-June, 2000 pp.32-39.) totally falsified Hutton’s and Lyell’s nineteenth century account of the earth’s sediments and the fossils in them that they claimed proved all were laid down and formed successively over millions of years. Berthault’s findings - coupled with observations gleaned from the well docuмented volcanic eruption at Mt St Helens in Washington State during the 1980s where massive deposits of sediments (millions of years of them?) were laid down in a matter of hours - offered the world more empirical evidence that showed the long-age sedimentation geology used by Darwin for his evolution, from gas to human beings, is no longer feasible. The above findings were published in the French scientific review Fusion. Peter Wilders tells us how the scientific world reacted.
‘First was the classical and normally most effective tactic of silence. By not replying to the docuмentation sent to them, the Geological Society, in this case that of France, blocked all dialogue. The author of the experiments countered their tactics by sending a copy of the scientific journal to all the 1,200 or so active members of the society. In this way, everyone in the geological community in France was made aware of the experimental results. The society retaliated by attacking the experimenter from authority, i.e., they claimed that all the geologists for three centuries could not be wrong; therefore the experimental evidence could be safely ignored. The success of such a method depended upon the geologists being united. To a large extent they were, but a few responded independently of the society saying they were interested… Supportive geologists fearing for their credibility and, therefore livelihood, wait in the wings.’ ---P. Wilders, David and Goliath, Christian Order, May 2001, p.335.
Wilders goes on to say that the final rejection of Berthault’s evidence
came from the Catholic hierarchy. Although out of their competence, they placed a letter in the Geological Society’s half-yearly newsletter and, giving no heed at all to the empirical evidence supplied by Berthault, they accused the scientist of ‘pseudo-science and creationism.’ ‘By attacking his personal credibility they knew that most geologists would not take his work seriously’ wrote Wilders.
Finally, there is the Mount St Helens volcano eruption in Washington State in 1980. In a matter of hours and days layer after layer of sedimentation formed before the very eyes of the scientists studying the explosion. This demonstrated that the supposed thousands, if not millions of years of uniformitarian sediment building, could in fact be created in hours or days. In other words a catastrophic one year long flood accompanied by volcanic eruption, which then receded, could well have formed very quickly most of the sedimentary and igneous deposits as well as the great canyons and other land formations found on earth today. Apply this evidence to the rule of faith, where all that is necessary to confirm the opinion of the Fathers of the Genesis flood is that it has never been proven untrue and so it remains as revealed, and rest assure that so-called science never came anywhere close to empirically falsifying the literal account as recorded in Scripture. But the Catholic hierarchy had long committed themselves to ‘modern science’ for their Creation account, and that was shown in their attack on Berthault’s findings.
THE MOON ‘6,000 years, you must be joking?’ No actually, for there is no way to determine the age of the moon (or any rock) for certain. Consider this for what its worth: When it became clear that men could be sent to the moon, scientists said that the moon is 4.6 billion years old, so, because of meteors and falling cosmic dust at today’s calculated rate of bombardment, with no atmosphere to burn them/it, no rain or water to cement or scatter them/it, there could be up to 50 to 180 feet of dust in places on its surface, making it difficult to land. Two probes, Ranger and Surveyor, constructed with long legs for the deep dust, were sent to investigate. Indeed, Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon, stated to his brother that his greatest fear was the lunar dust awaiting him. As it turned out they found only an inch of powder evenly distributed on the moon’s surface, 6,000 years of it if current calculations of dust falling on the moon are accurate and correct.
(THE EARTHMOVERS)