WHAT ABOUT FOSSILS?

Fossils

The word ‘fossil’ comes from the Latin ‘fossa’, meaning a ditch, so it literally means something buried. Fossils are the remains, or impression of a plant or animal which has been turned to stone (petrified) by chemical and geological processes over time. Although I am no expert (but then nor are most people who claim that ‘fossils prove evolution’) , the subject comes up so often that I offer a brief overview of the relevant facts about fossils with links pointing to further sources of information for the interested student.

Despite what is drummed into us from Primary School and constantly reinforced by the BBC, fossils are no help to the Darwinian theory. Quite the reverse. Darwin knew this and put a whole chapter of excuses for the missing fossil evidence in his ‘Origin of Species’.

Fossils demonstrate sudden appearance of complicated and diverse life forms, many of which later became extinct. The millions of ‘missing links’ whch would support the idea of gradual change from fish to amphibian to reptile to bird to mammal to man are simply absent.

There is something else about fossils which is rarely discussed-they are found in sedimentary rocks, which of course are formed from mud. Most fossils were formed when living animals were overwhelmed by sudden massive mud flows, caused by a FLOOD. If fish or dinosaurs just died and fell to the ocean floor or the earth, they would be eaten and never turn into fossils. This is obvious when you stop to think about it. Fossils are the remains of animals that were suddenly overwhelmed by fast moving mud flows that later solidified into sedimentary rock.

Fossils are usually claimed to be hundreds of millions of years old, but this depends on the accuracy of dating methods. In actual fact, fossils can be produced in a decade or two in the right conditions.

Charles Darwin described the fossil remains of large extinct land mammals he found in South America in his travel account “Voyage of the Beagle”. He described some of them as having a significant fat content and being capable of being lit so they burned with a yellow flame. This suggested they are perhaps not millions of years old as the theory he was later to propose suggested. Recent dinosaur bones have been unearthed that had soft material inside. It is hardly likely that these could have been hundreds of millions of years old. Google the Mary Schweitzer T Rex. It is important to understand that the dating of dinosaur and other fossils depends on assumptions about the past that cannot be independently verified.

It has been proved experimentally and by direct observation thatfossils can be formed in a very short time. Following a recent geological catastrophe at lake Tarawera, New Zealand, several household objects, including a ham and a bowler hat were petrified (turned into stone) in a few years. Further items on fossils can be viewed by clicking here.

There is a famous ‘dripping well’ in Yorkshire where objects such asTeddy bears have been fossilised. There is no independently verifiable evidence that fossils we are told are millions of years old are in fact so old. Carbon dating is reasonably accurate for several thousand years into the past, but the dating methods which claim to prove that certain fossils and rocks are millions of years old are based onassumptions which cannot be independently verified.

Dinosaurs occupy an iconic place in the minds of evolutionists and others. Who can forget their first sight of the brontosaurus and T Rex reconstructed skeletons in the London Natural History Museum? Some folks seem to believe that the very fact that dinosaurs existed in the past and are now (almost certainly) extinct is of itself a supportive evidence for evolution.

As an interesting aside, in a TV dramatisation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s drama ‘The Lost World’, a story about finding live dinosaurs on a lost plateau in South America, the writer added a strand to the story, which was not present in the novel. In this additional plot, a fundamentalist Christian preacher knows about the dinosaurs, but believes that they disprove his faith, being ‘made by the Devil, not God’. He wants to keep them a secret from the world, so deliberately cuts the bridge leaving the band of explorers AND HIS DAUGHTER to be killed, in order to protect the secret. This is the most hateful caricature that could be imagined, portraying a Christian preacher as a self deluded homicidal madman. This was broadcast at Christmas a few years ago, a typical example of the poisonous anti-creationist propaganda in which the unaccountable BBC specialises.

The fact is that dinosaurs and their extinction pose fewer problems for the young earth creationist than the evolutionist. For a detailed discussion of this, check out this item on dinosaurs and their extinction from James Foard’s web site

Dinosaurs, otherwise known as dragons, are mentioned in the Bible in the book of Job, see here for more on why dinosaurs are no problem for biblical creation. In particular, there are legends of large terrifying reptiles, some land based, others aquatic or winged, from all over the world which pre-date the discovery of the first dinosaur fossils. The most obvious inference from this is that men and dinosaurs (=dragons) once lived together. Dragon legends, like flood legends, are found all over the world.

It is generally taught to children and others that fossils of fishes and land animals were formed when the animals died, fell to the sea bed or earth, and then over long periods of time dust or silt covered them and they were gradually turned into fossils as dissolved salts trickled through and made a sort of plaster cast. The first part of this scenario is extremely unlikely. As any sea angler knows, (and I am a sea angler) if a dead fish, crab or worm falls to the sea floor, it will be eaten by other fish, crabs, shrimps etc within minutes, hours at the most. Whole shoals of fossil fish are found in the ancient rocks, they must have been overwhelmed by some catastrophe, a colossal underwater mud slide perhaps?

Ape men?

We have been force fed a bucket of excrement over so call hominid and ape like ancestor fossils which allegedly show progress from ape to man but which absolutely do no such thing.This systematic deception is well documented in creationist literature which is routinely ignored by the mainstream culture. Pekin and Java man for example were complete swindles, based on gross over interpretation tiny fragments of evidence which have since mainly dissapeared.Nebraska man was based on one pig’s tooth. ‘Lucy‘ was an ape, as was australopithecus. The Piltdown man fraud (invariably falsely refered to as a ‘hoax’) was deliberately designed (probably by the theistic evolutionist Teilhard de Chardin-look up Malcolm Bowden’s excellent work on this subject). Neanderthal man was fully human as is increasingly acknowledged. The basic facts are that a desperate search  for fossil evidence to prove we ddescended from ape like animals has twisted a tiny amount of evidence to ‘prove’ a pre-determined conclusion. No woman has ever given birth to an ape: if evolution is true, why not? 

We are often told that the fossils ‘prove’ evolution-but do they?

Setting aside the question of the age of the fossils (and there is good evidence to doubt the reliability of the methods we have been told ‘prove’ the age of the rocks), we have to ask the same question that Charles Darwin asked in ‘Origin of Species’, namely, if, as Darwin believed, all the living things we see today and all that have ever existed came about by gradual small changes, then where are the intermediate types? If over millions of years amphibians came from fish, reptiles came from amphibians, birds came from reptiles, men came from apes, amphibians came from fish, then there should be examples of things which are 90% fish 10% amphibian, 80% fish 20% amphibian, 70% fish 30% amphibian, and so on. Darwin acknowledged that the intermediate kinds his hypothesis required did not exist either alive today or as fossils. His excuse for this was the‘imperfection of the fossil record’ and he was sure that future fossil discoveries would validate his theory by finding the missing kinds. How valid is this excuse today?

Let us do a ‘thought experiment’ as we consider how valid it is for evolutionists to still make excuses for the absence of the millions of missing links. If you walk from Southampton to Inverness, it will take you several weeks, much longer if you walk slowly or have to keep going back as you have forgotten something, or suffer an injury. Assuming you walked though towns, you would probably be caught several hundred times on CCTV cameras, would you not? So if fishes gradually changed into human beings over hundreds of millions of years, and fossilisation events (such as ‘ordinary’ floods and tsunamis) happened every few hundred or even thousand years, would you not expect a large number of the intermediate steps to have been caught on the ‘fossil camera’? Darwin was unable to deny that the many successive intermediate stages his theory required had not been found, he wrote a whole chapter in ‘Origin of Species’ making excuses for the missing evidence. He believed the ‘missing’ fossils which he needed to support his hypothesis would be found. In his chapter on ‘The extreme imperfection of the fossil record’ he said he was sure that the problem would be ironed out. It hasn’t been.

True theories should make predictions which are fulfilled-this key prediction has not been fulfilled, despite the finding of billions of fossils. And don’t forget that most of the fossil hunting has been done by well-funded institutions and people who believe in evolution and want to get the credit for discovering the missing intermediate forms.

150 years of energetic and well funded world-wide searching for fossils to ‘prove’ evolution have failed to reveal more than a tiny handful of disputed possible intermediate forms. If Darwin was right about gradual changes happening over millions of years, millions and millions of ‘missing links’ would have come to light. The fact that each Archaeopteryx, Tiktaalik, Flores man, ‘Ida the fossil lemur’ etc is triumphantly announced as ‘THE’ missing link only underlines the lack of the MILLIONS of intermediate missing links which Darwin’s hypothesis of gradual change over millions of years requires to sustain it.

The rocks tell a different story. The deepest rock layers which contain any fossils, the ‘Cambrian’ rock layers show large numbers of complicated life forms, most of which in their large groups (phyla) still exist today, some practically unchanged. This sudden appearance of life forms is called the Cambrian explosion and is unexplained by evolutionists. The fossil record shows sudden appearance of complicated life forms with no ‘ancestors’ followed by stasis (no change over time, e.g. Wollemi pine, Coelacanth, tuatara, bivalve shellfish etc) and some extinctions, which fits the creation and global flood model better than the evolutionary model. The evolutionists won’t admit that the Cambrian explosion goes against Darwin’s suppositions, but they can’t explain it satisfactorily.

What about the evidence of progress from one sort of animal to another in the fossil record? Evidence of such progress simply does not exist. The so called horse series is just rubbish. Again, an example of beginning with a conclusion and then massaging, cutting, pasting and selectively deleting the evidence to fit the pre-determined conclusion. This is the opposite of the scientific process.

What about all the hominid, ape-man, Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon man and other fossils? Basically these represent a classic case of beginning the scientific process with a conclusion, then seeking ‘facts’ to fit the conclusion, rather like solving a jigsaw puzzle by cutting the pieces to fit and using glue and paint. The ‘hominid’ fossils were apes, the Neanderthals (who had bigger brains than us) were humans suffering from rickets and syphilis, and Cro-Magnon man is indistinguishable from today’s men and women.

I have found fossil sea shells on English beaches: they were effectively identical with living forms.

The fossils, when Darwinian propaganda is set aside for a moment and they are viewed with an open mind, show the sudden appearance of many diverse and complicated life forms with no ancestors, followed by stasis, limited variations within kinds (as in contemporary dog varieties), and some extinctions. All of this is more consistent with the Biblical Genesis account that atoms to us by accident via millions of tiny ‘undirected progress’ changes.