Dinosaurs...

[buffalo]

The Green River Formation: 10,000,000 layers of sediment a couple of millimeters thick each. And each layer representing one years deposition on a lake bed.

But can a lake survive continuously, undisturbed totally, as a lake for 10 million years. No ice-ages, no glaciers or ice sheets gouging the lake bed during all of that 10 million years.

How would I measure the deposition rates in the green river formation. Well, I might question the probabilities of a lake remaining as a lake continuously for 10 million years. And also it being undisturbed during all of that time.

I might look for other mechanisms for depositing sediment in regular consistant layers, other than as annual layers.

I might think they represent the tide flowing into a brackish lake carrying in calcarious sediment twice a day at high tides.

So that now you have 2 high tides a day or 730 high tides a year divided into 10,000,000 layers of sediment gives you an age for the lake of 13,699 years.

And as these layers are occasionally interspersed with interlocking layers of sediment from the shore I can then estimate the amount of time, in years, it took to lay down x amount of sediment on the shore.

Then I might find mammalian fossil jawbones in the shoreline sediment. The lower fossil I used to think was 5 million years older than the top fossil and that these fossils represented the evolution of a mammal over 5 million years.

But now I might see that the fossils were only 6,500 years apart and as a consequence they either showed remarkably speedy evolution or they did not show evolution at all.

That is if I were allowed to think about these things, that is.

http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSsdMJO6jvCQKwDYJmlXTRGiLlDlWlHtx7Hk67kVs6Gt-EPxFANc6yq5UXu

 

[nonanon]

In fact a 6 foot thick coal seam expressed in a cubic way, for example, a six foot cube of solid coal is the same weight as one 100 foot high tree fern. So a tropical humid tree fern forest ideal conditions for tree ferns could produce a tree density of, lets say, 1 tree per 6 square feet at a maximum.

That density would give us 6 feet of coal, as we now have today, but, it would mean that only one tree grew in that forest area over a period of ideal conditions which may have lasted 10’s of thousands of years or 100’s of thousands of years or a million years. If the forest existed for only 10,000 years and a tree-fern lived for 100 years then that means 100 trees lived and grew and died on our 6 foot area of soil producing a coal seam 600 feet thick.
Instead we have a coal seam only 6 feet thick which we are told possibly represents 10’s of thousands of years of the geologic timeline.

Strange…when trees die in the forest now, most of the mass of the tree decays, burns or is digested by other organisms, leaving little available mass to form coal. Yet for your timeline to hold, 100% of the mass of all of the trees in the forest ends up in the coal. Not convincing.

And you haven’t yet addressed the point that quite a bit of nuclear chemistry, geology, etc. has to be false for the fossil dating to be as wrong as it would need to be to support this timeline. Not convincing.

 

[buffalo]

Strange…when trees die in the forest now, most of the mass of the tree decays, burns or is digested by other organisms, leaving little available mass to form coal. Yet for your timeline to hold, 100% of the mass of all of the trees in the forest ends up in the coal. Not convincing.

And you haven’t yet addressed the point that quite a bit of nuclear chemistry, geology, etc. has to be false for the fossil dating to be as wrong as it would need to be to support this timeline. Not convincing.

What say you about the soft tissue finds?

 

[edwest2]

The Church leaves us open to how life formed on Earth. The scientific evidence of dinosaurs is patently clear and the Church has no conflict at all in this.

Keeping in mind that discussions of evolution are banned topics, as another poster noted, the last of the animals we call the dinosaurs suffered a mass extinction about 65 million years ago when an asteroid struck the earth, destroying the animals and much of their food sources. Only smaller animals were able to survive and continue. According to the geological and paleontological record, humanoid creatures were not present at that time.

The Church only requires the faithful to hold to the belief that humanity was founded on two specific people: Adam and Eve. While the body of man may have developed over the eons by God’s initial design, He chose these two people and gave them something that no other hominids ever had: The special and divine creation of Adam and Eve’s rational souls.

Since science has not located a soul or defined its attributes, there is no scientific reason to believe a soul exists. To combine science and religion this way is not possible. There is no Church document that mentions this idea.

Peace,
Ed

 

[nonanon]

Since science has not located a soul or defined its attributes, there is no scientific reason to believe a soul exists. To combine science and religion this way is not possible. There is no Church document that mentions this idea.

I don’t understand where the idea originated that the soul was something that science could find. By definition, the soul survives death and lives on outside of space and time (the physical universe). Therefore it is by nature not part of the physical universe, and outside the realm of scientific inquiry.

 

[grannymh]

Primates evolved 50-55 million years ago; the most recent common ancestor between humans and the other great apes was 5-7 million years ago.

5-7 millions years ago? That makes the most recent common ancestor about two million years old. Long live the Queen!

 

[grannymh]

I don’t understand where the idea originated that the soul was something that science could find. By definition, the soul survives death and lives on outside of space and time (the physical universe). Therefore it is by nature not part of the physical universe, and outside the realm of scientific inquiry.

What some scientists are looking for is not quite the spiritual soul itself; but rather the attributes or faculties of the soul. If those attributes or faculties somehow emerged on their own from some part of the material anatomy, then there would be no need for the spiritual soul and God could be ultimately eliminated. Well, maybe not all-the-way elimination – forcing God, the Creator, to bow to the limits of His material creations would be sufficient.

 

[nonanon]

What some scientists are looking for is not quite the spiritual soul itself; but rather the attributes or faculties of the soul. If those attributes or faculties somehow emerged on their own from some part of the material anatomy, then there would be no need for the spiritual soul and God could be ultimately eliminated. Well, maybe not all-the-way elimination – forcing God, the Creator, to bow to the limits of His material creations would be sufficient.

But “immortality” is an essential attribute of the soul. Surely no serious scientist thinks this can be demonstrated with anything from the material world, either to scientists or theologians.

 

[grannymh]

The Church does not pronounce on scientific topics. It is open to us to accept or reject evolution, gravity, plate tectonics, the germ theory of disease, etc.

The Catholic Church does have some doctrines which are not open for rejection.

The basic, solid, firm, undeniable doctrine is that human origin began with two human beings whose nature uniquely united both material anatomy *and *spiritual soul. Another doctrine is that there was a real, no doubt about it, actual original sin committed by the actual first human being.

 

[grannymh]

But “immortality” is an essential attribute of the soul. Surely no serious scientist thinks this can be demonstrated with anything from the material world, either to scientists or theologians.

I am not referring to immortality–that is a whole different area.

What some scientists are looking for is the location of the soul’s intellective power and will. The “hope” is that the material anatomy has, on its own, replaced the spiritual soul as the source. This contradicts Divine Revelation as taught by the Catholic Church.

 

[StAnastasia]

I don’t understand where the idea originated that the soul was something that science could find. By definition, the soul survives death and lives on outside of space and time (the physical universe). Therefore it is by nature not part of the physical universe, and outside the realm of scientific inquiry.

And yet, some people are always trying to “prove” there is life after death. We have nothing but pious hope and philosophical speculation on this one.

 

[grannymh]

And yet, some people are always trying to “prove” there is life after death. We have nothing but pious hope and philosophical speculation on this one.

It is a very good thing that the Catholic Church is very clear that there is life after death. Jesus Christ is the Person Who taught that in many different ways and then He, Himself, demonstrated life after death.

 

[StAnastasia]

It is a very good thing that the Catholic Church is very clear that there is life after death. Jesus Christ is the Person Who taught that in many different ways and then He, Himself, demonstrated life after death.

That’s what I said – pious hope and philosophical speculation.

 

[nonanon]

I am not referring to immortality–that is a whole different area.

What some scientists are looking for is the location of the soul’s intellective power and will. The “hope” is that the material anatomy has, on its own, replaced the spiritual soul as the source. This contradicts Divine Revelation as taught by the Catholic Church.

If that’s the objective, it sounds to me like a fool’s errand. Identifying structures and processes in the brain associated with carrying out these functions does not disprove the existence of an immortal soul. (Although Hawking’s question-begging proposition that the universe “created itself” still strikes me as more foolish.)

The analogy that comes to mind is studying the electronic hardware in a computer, concluding that it alone constitutes the machine, and that therefore software does not exist.

 

[You]

Strange…when trees die in the forest now, most of the mass of the tree decays, burns or is digested by other organisms, leaving little available mass to form coal. Yet for your timeline to hold, 100% of the mass of all of the trees in the forest ends up in the coal. Not convincing.

And you haven’t yet addressed the point that quite a bit of nuclear chemistry, geology, etc. has to be false for the fossil dating to be as wrong as it would need to be to support this timeline. Not convincing.

In our forests no coal forms, for those very reasons, total decay. Even if what you said was possible it would not result in coal seams of pure coal, you would have hundreds or thousands of feet of mudstone with invisible trace atoms of carbon spread evenly through thousands of feet of rock.

 

[rossum]

What say you about the soft tissue finds?

On a very few occasions some very decayed, but still surviving, soft tissue has been found. amino acid sequencing showed that it was closer to a chicken than to modern reptiles, hence tending to confirm that modern birds evolved from dinosaurs.

We also have many fossils of soft tissue, where there is none of the original biological material left, but it has all been replaced by stone. Some people mistake such finds for actual surviving soft tissue, as I described in the first paragraph.

rossum

 

[grannymh]

The Catholic Church offers more than “pious hope and philosophical speculation.” The Catholic Church offers the Word of God. Dinosaurs are in a different category.

Those people lucky enough to have visited the Burpee Museum have seen the interactive displays regarding speculations about dinosaurs. Note: I have not been there for some time, so there may be different displays. The point is that there are many possible explanations for the lives and deaths of multiple varieties of dinosaurs.
Not all became birds – or least that was the assumption a few years ago.

One of the museum displays shows how a local hospital, with its technology, helped explain a “bump” on one of Jane’s bones. Jane is one of the more complete young dinosaurs in the world. Talk about hope and scientific speculation when her first bones were found ! ! !

Unfortunately, there are some, not all, people so caught up in the wonders of science, that they unwittingly think about God in the limited terminology of science. Unfortunately, there are a few, not all, Catholics who have watered down the beautiful truths of Catholicism in order to fit them into the scientific parameter. For example, there are a few, not all, Catholics who have laid aside the creative power of God in order to fit the amazing human nature (descending from two parents) into a material/physical plastic box.

 

[nonanon]

What say you about the soft tissue finds?

I don’t see that they support the assertion that humans coexisted with dinosaurs.

 

[StAnastasia]

The Catholic Church offers more than “pious hope and philosophical speculation.” The Catholic Church offers the Word of God.

Granny, what do you have against either piety or hope? The Nicene Creed declares our hope in the life of the world to come. And while Saint Paul tells us that “we see through a glass darkly,” philosophical speculation explores how it might be possible that a disembodied soul could survive death. Although we have no conclusive proof of individual survival after death, we have the hope inspired by the disciples’ reported resurrection appearances of Jesus

 

[StAnastasia]

I don’t see that they support the assertion that humans coexisted with dinosaurs.

They don’t. These species lived tens of millions of years apart.