Dragons and Dinosaurs

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Nonsense. The Church is a patron of the sciences. We aren’t Fundamentalist Protestants. Many great scientific theories were first formulated by Catholic priests. Take the Big Bang Model…first developed and proposed by the Catholic priest / astronomer Monsignor Lemaitre. Secular scientists of the time (early 20th century) believed that the universe had always existed with no beginning…he demonstrated that there was strong evidence for a beginning…and thus a creator.
 
TL;DR: If evolution is “just a theory”, why don’t you deny the theory of gravity and float away?

It’s just a theory.


There’s more biologists called Steve that support Evolution than there are Creationist scientists altogether. Shouldn’t that suggest something to you?
 
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“The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution…” Steven Stanley

The fossil record tells us almost nothing about evolutionary origin of phyla and classes. Intermediate forms are non-existent, undiscovered, or not recognized.” Robert Barnes

“Evolutionary biologists can no longer ignore the fossil record on the ground that it is imperfect.” David S Woodruff,

“The fossil record itself provided no documentation of continuity — of gradual transitions from one kind of animal or plant to another of quite different form.” Steven M Stanley

“The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.” Stephen J Gould

“No real evolutionist uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of evolution over creation.” Mark Ridley
 
I don’t know the context of those quotes nor the date (as new finds are discovered all the time…), but as Fr. George Coyne would tell you, lack of evidence right now doesn’t necessarily equate lack of evidence in the future… the good Father, as a priest and scientist, warns us against the logical fallacy of the “God of the gaps”.
 
“The observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor’s new clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin’s predicted pattern, simply looked the other way.” Niles Eldredge, and Ian Tattersall
 
“The fragmentary nature of the fossil record prevents the paleontologist from using the taxonomic approach or any other method for calculating evolutionary rates in specific phyletic lines” Barbara Stahl
 
Paleontology “proffered a collective tacit acceptance of the story of gradual adaptive change, a story that strengthened and became even more entrenched as the synthesis took hold. We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports that interpretation, all the while really knowing that it does not.” Niles Eldredge

“Each class at molecular level is unique, isolated and unlinked by intermediates. Thus, molecules, like fossils, have failed to provide the elusive intermediates so long sought by evolutionary biology. Michael Denton

“Fossils have … failed to yield the host of transitional form demanded by evolutionary theory” and the “absence of transitional forms is dramatically obvious.” Michael Denton

“Most major groups of animals appear abruptly in the fossil record, fully formed, and with no fossils yet discovered that form a transition from their parent group. Thus, it has seldom been possible to piece together ancestor-dependent sequences from the fossil record that show gradual, smooth transitions between species.” CP Hickman
 
“Indeed, it is the chief frustration of the fossil record that we do not have empirical evidence for sustained trends in the evolution of most complex morphological adaptations.” Stephen J Gould and Niles Eldredge

“The gaps in the fossil record are real, however. The absence of a record of any important branching is quite phenomenal. Species are usually static, or nearly so, for long periods, species seldom and genera never show evolution into new species or genera but replacement of one by another, and change is more or less abrupt.” Robert Wesson

“The fossil record has always been a problem.” Montgomery Slatkin,

“No fossils are known that can be considered intermediate between these clearly aquatic [osteolepiform] fish and genera that are unequivocally classified as terrestrial vertebrates”
Robert L Carroll

“No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It never seemed to happen.” Niles Eldredge

“No intermediate fossils between jawed and jawless forms have been found – early fossils of jawed fishes had jaws, teeth, scales and spines. The origins of jaws and other structures that characterized the early gnathostomes are lost in the fossil record, belonging to some group about which we known nothing.” GS Helfman, BB Collette, and DE Facey
 
Why are we telling God that He can’t have created evolution, dinosaurs, dragons and Lucy? That’s close to heresy, trying to control God, be above God.

I was at a talk this week, with Jesuit Superior. When he was young he gave a series of Homilies about the names we call God. Ie God the Father. This Priest said we could call God our Mother. People sitting in Mass objected, one homeless guy got up, told the Priest off and walked out. The head of the Parish discussed the reaction with this young Jesuit and said, keep giving that Homily over this weekend. Because the point is God is all, God is everything, God is in charge of everything. If we insist God can only be called x y or z , we are making ourselves creators, rather then creatures.

Anyone speaking out against the creations of God ie Dinosaurs, evolution, fire ants in South America, is attempting to put themselves in the Creator position.

Think about it.

Can you provide a source of ‘its common knowledge Lucy is human and chimp mock up’
@RoseofMary1
 
Species “appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus—full grown and raring to go.” Jeffrey Schwartz

“Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else.” Colin Patterson

“What is missing are the many intermediate forms hypothesized by Darwin, and the continual divergence of major lineages into the morphospace between distinct adaptive types.” Robert L Carroll

“Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series.” Ernst May

“The long-term stasis, following a geologically abrupt origin, of most fossil morphospecies, has always been recognized by professional paleontologists” Stephen J Gould

“Not having any fossils that can serve as missing links, we have to fall back on the time-honored method of historical science, the construction of a historical narrative.” Ernst May
 

I must have got it mixed up with another article I was reading about brain tissue found in apparently 130 million year old dinosaur fossil. This one I’m talking about is 68 million years old.

It says in the article that they’ve been getting flack from creationists…probably because this sort of find would most likely put a huge dent in the evolution theory.

There was also tissue found in a 195 million year old dinosaur rib. http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/03/world/dinosaur-rib-195-million-year-old-collagen-history/index.html
 
“About 80% of all known fossils are marine animals, mostly various types of fish. Yet there is no evidence of intermediate forms. The most common explanation for the total lack of fossil evidence for fish evolution is that few transitional fossils have been preserved. This is an incorrect conclusion because every major fish kind known today has been found in the fossil record, indicating the completeness of the existing known fossil record.” Jerry Bergman
 
“When do we see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang, and often with no firm evidence that the organism did not evolve elsewhere.” James Le Lanu

“I wish we did have a complete and unbroken trail of fossils, an cinematic record of all evolutionary change as it happened.” Richard Dawkins

“The main reason for paleontologist’s loss of faith in the orthodox evolutionary doctrine was the realization that the most notable features of the fossil record is that most of the time nothing happens.” James Le Lanu

“This ‘stasis’ clearly contradicts Darwin’s supposition if a continuous process of gradualistic transformation” James Le Lanu

”Evidence for these theories [origin of life] come, of course, not from the fossil record but from inferences based on biochemical comparisons of living forms.” Eugenie Scott

”… the fossil evidence currently does not illuminate links among most of the basic vertebrate groups.” Eugenie Scott

“Why… does the fossil record always happen to be incomplete at the nodes connecting major branches of Darwin’s tree of life, but rarely−in the parlance of modern paleontology−at the terminal branches” Stephen C Meye

“Of course, the fossil record does not show an overall increase in the complexity of organisms from Precambrian to Cambrian times, as Darwin expected.” Stephen C Meyer
 
That is simply not true. It is not a fact. And it has no scientific value. No, the writings of the Popes do not show an openness to evolution. Their responses are explicit regarding a few aspects about the human body. Species is a vague term. I can test gravity myself but not any sort of evolution.
 
Techno, you have obviously found a YEC quotemine site. Two points:

First, here is a quotemine:
“There is no God” – The Bible.
Does that convince you? no, I didn’t think it would. Not do your multiple quotemines. You quote Gould, among others. I can also quote Gould:
Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists – whether through design or stupidity, I do not know – as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups. (emphasis added)
  • Gould, Stephen Jay 1983. “Evolution as Fact and Theory” in Hens Teeth and Horse’s Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., p. 258-260.
Consider human fossils in America. Did humans appear “suddenly” in America? Of course they did. One day there were no humans in America, then next day a group had crossed from Siberia and there were suddenly humans in America. You do not find human transitionals in America because humans did not evolve there, they travelled there. The human transitionals are found elsewhere.

Second, what you are doing is an old YEC tactic. So old it even has a name: the Gish Gallop. If you have to resort to such tactics, then it shows that you know that you are losing the argument.

rossum
 
“As more and more fossil discoveries fall within existing higher taxonomic groups…, and as they fail to document the rainbow of intermediate forms expected in the Darwinian view of life, it grows ever more improbable that the absence of intermediate forms reflects sampling bias−that is, an ‘artifact’ of either incomplete sampling or preservation.” Stephen C Meyer

“The problem is that the fossil record isn’t always obliging when it comes to direct evidence.” Brian Switek

http://www.darwinthenandnow.com/darwin-dilemmas/fossil-record/
 
“37. When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.[12]”
  • Humani Generis
 
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