...and a vast ignorance of geology! Marine fossils are found on mountains, (I've found them myself) in marine layers that were upthrust during orogeny - the geological mountain-building process. Generally this is found where tectonic plates collide, with one subducting (going under) and the other upthrust, creating mountain ranges like the Rockies and the Himalayas. If you're going to tell me plate tectonics is a myth and continents don't move, let me preemptively answer that we can measure plate movement now, usually a few centimeters per year. Slow, but real, involving emormous masses and kinetic energy to build mountains.

No magic required.

You must be looking in the wrong places. There are literally millions of fossils in collections in museums and universities around the world. Some of them are of lines that died out. Many others actually are predecessors of creatures alive today, back to such creatures as polychaete worms. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/annelid-bristle-worm-fossil-discovered-canada-spd/

We don't have many worm fossils, or older critters, because it's very rare for small, soft-bodied creatures to be preserved. The few that weren't eaten we most likely crushed.



Actually, "Piltdown Man" is in a category by itself, because it was a deliberate hoax - a gorilla mandible joined to a human cranium. The hoax was discovered and exposed, because most scientists want to keep the process honest and above reproach.

Peking Man (Homo erectus pekinensis) is legit, about 700,000 years old, though there is debate on whether it was a direct ancestor of modern man.

"Nebraska man" was named on the basis of a badly weathered tooth that was originally misidentified as human. Turned out to be the tooth of an extinct species of peccary. Rather than a hoax, this was a simple mistake. Humans did not evolve in the Americas, but migrated here.




Not bloody likely. Lucy's place in human evolution is well established.



Because evolution applies to life. Not to nonliving objects. The comparison is not valid.



What you see in the sides of the Grand Canyon are the strata of millions of years of deposition. Erosion applies only to exposed surfaces - the top surface, and the sides and bottom of the canyon. The real erosion happened in the canyon itself, where the Colorado River has carved its way through the rocks. I assume you know this, and were throwing out this specious argument in an attempt to "trap" me.

Probably because you can't radiocarbon date rocks; they're mostly silicon. Radiocarbon dating works on organic materials, things that were once alive, like bones and wood. Living processes take in carbon-14 from the environment, which decays at a known rate. That is then compared to the amount of carbon-12; the ratio indicates the degree of decay, which translates into the object's age.

Last time I checked, rocks had no metabolic processes to intake carbon.

Radiocarbon dating is one of the most accurate tests we have within its range - under about 20,000 years. After that the carbon-14 has decayed to the point that measurements aren't reliable.

Well, excuse me. I was just using what I found in the Bible. There are no other children of Noah mentioned, and I've known fundamentalists to say that if it wasn't in the Bible, it didn't exist.



Those large insect fossils you speak of, like the dragonfly Meganeura and the centipede Arthropleura, come from the Carboniferous Era, before the first dinosaurs, about 300 million years ago. Are saying this was after the biblical flood?



Can you find me citations of these "brass and iron tools buried with fossils that we cannot duplicate today" in a source that is NOT a creationist publication? There is no mystery about the pyramids, and no, I don't believe we came from rocks. Please don't project your wacky ideas of what I believe on me.



You're saying that all the water of the modern oceans was UNDERGROUND? Wow, you must embarrass even other creationists with that idea! Can you imagine what the climate would be without oceans to provide humidity and stabilize temperatures? The reason the oceans are on top of 70% of the Earth's surface is because rock is heavier than water, not the other way around.
Yes, at one time there was one continent; we call it Pangaea. But that was because of continental drift, and you can fit the continents together like a puzzle into their former places. The rest of the surface was a huge ocean.



Actually, the fossilization processes (and there are more than one) are well understood. Usually it involves mud washing over the carcass and eventually turning to stone. Sometimes it involves a carcass falling in an anaerobic body of water, protected from bacterial decomposition, which produces spectacular fossils like the Archaeopteryx of the Solnhofen lagoon. Doesn't require any biblical flood, much less a volcano.



And Torquemada believed in the Church and the Inquisition. Citing evil people as character witnesses has nothing to do with science, nor do the other ideas you promote.



Yeah, I kinda saw this coming, with the ragtag assortment of ideas you've tossed into the pot. The Green New Deal is intended to save the Earth from the climate change that you no doubt deny, and the longer ignorant people delay any action, the worse our childrens' world will be. The ideas you throw in are fearmongering designed by science deniers to try to demonize anyone who disagrees. I'm sorry you fall for that ridiculous crap.

Wow, your final sentence demonstrates a vast misunderstanding of how evolution and biology work. Every fossil is of a complex, fully functioning critter? (Actually, many fossils are of scattered bones, or even just teeth - because enamel is harder than bone, and many critters shed or lose teeth.)

Did you expect fossils of nonfunctional critters? Evolution traces the progression from species A to its successor species B, and we have many examples of it. Look up the progression of human evolution - from Australopithecus afarensis to Homo sapiens. There may be some links missing, but there are a lot of links present - the existence of which you can't account for WITHOUT evolution.

The fossil record is growing all the time, and it absolutely does support evolution.

You mean this "ark"?
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/100428-noahs-ark-found-in-turkey-science-religion-culture/

This claim doesn't seem to be accepted very widely. Though I have to say I'm amused by Tood Wood, the Creationist "scientist" who says radiocarbon dating needs to be "recalibrated," because it keeps coming up with dates older than the 6000 years he believes is the age of the Earth. A lovely example of, "If the facts don't conform to the theory, they must be disposed of!"

That is exactly how evolution works, how species diverge. Two groups from a similar origin focus on different foods, or different homes, and before you know it you have coyotes separating from wolves, otters from weasels, cattle from bison, and so on. One group moves, gets some physical distance, and the gene pools are separated and consolidated. That's the evolutionary process. The article I cited was a closeup on the process of speciation in action.

Humans have often had a hand in this, with domestication and selective breeding. Wild turkeys are quite different from farm turkeys. We have shaped cattle and chickens into dramatically different forms. Perhaps the most dramatic example is dogs - everything from chihuahuas to great danes, Rottweilers to dachshunds. A paleontologist ten thousand years from now would never guess the skeletons came from the same stock - and realistically, a great dane can't breed with a chihuahua. Are they still one species (canis familiaris)?

Evolution is real, and still happening.

I'm taking "our generation" here to mean our civilization. Previous civilizations postulated gods to explain what was poorly understood - reproduction, storms and lightning, the origin of the Earth and universe. Our civilization is the first to reach so far into unknown and unravel the mysteries of science.



Ah, hell. What kind of a Supreme Being would come up with something like, "If you don't sing my praises you will be tortured forever"? Could such cruelty really come from a "loving" creator? It sounds more something from a four-year-old who pulls the wings off butterflies.

You really believe that? It's barbaric.

Have a nice day.

Here's a striking example from recent research:

https://www.wired.com/2016/10/legendary-biologists-clocked-evolutions-astonishing-speed/

The Galapagos islands are an excellent "laboratory" in which to observe evolution, as Darwin himself noted, because of their isolation and the pressure of survival. The finches there are famous examples of adaptation and speciation, but the story referenced above raises the bar. Read it and be amazed.

Actually, I have read the Bible - or most of it, anyway (I confess I couldn't plow through some of the Pentateuch; I was never interested in who begat whom).

You say, "A myth book, by definition, cannot contain historical facts." By whose definition? So if I include one fact in a book of myths that renders all the myths true???? This is a totally untenable and indefensible statement.

Besides, having read most of the Bible, I know that, despite usually being published in one set of covers, it's not one book. It's not even the Old (Aramaic) and New (Greek) Testaments. It's the Gospels (of questionable historical value; as I said, the historical existence of Jesus is not settled as fact), the epistles of Paul, the Hallucination of John. It's some histories, some poetry, some more hallucinations (e.g., Ezekiel), some folk wisdom, some genealogy, and a lot of laws. And, in the part we're discussing, the first few chapters if Genesis - some myths.

Even a lot of Christians will tell you that these myths can't be taken literally, because they are so far from reality. Six days of Creation. A talking snake tricking Eve into the original sin. And, yes, Noah and the flood.

I don't need to defend evolution. Evolution is accepted as de facto scientific fact. The details get revised as more evidence comes to light, yes - and that's why it can be trusted. The overall picture stays the same; new discoveries mostly fill in the blanks. We admit that we don't know everything, and probably never will. The theory itself stands strong, backed by mountains of evidence - first fossils, then observations of evolution in action, and more recently, genetic evidence. It all holds together under the most rigorous testing.

Instead, you'd have me believe in magic, based on Hebrew myths. Sorry, my credulity doesn't go that far.

Good day to you.

You're quite facile with tossing staggeringly large numbers as the odds of prophecy fulfillment. Can you tell me how those odds were computed? You didn't give any numeric parameters, nor even mention these seven prophecies that were apparently fulfilled - no doubt with the Bible as your verifying authority. Once again, the book validates itself in a circular "cuz it says so" kind of way.

And secular historians now seriously doubt whether Jesus of Nazareth ever existed.

I'll see your C.S. Lewis and raise you Richard Dawkins. "Intelligent design" has been a weak attempt to disguise blatant creationism, and it has no scientific credibility. Anywhere that serious science is done. Your bringing it up shows exactly how collapsible your case is.

You can't provide a convincing argument as long as your postulates are based on the Hebrew myth-book and your invisible magician in the sky. Unless you can present independent and credible evidence, all your arguments are built on sand.

Floyd said: "Saying it can't work is the same as saying God has limits and they are mankind discernible or that God must do everything in a matter that meets man's capability of understanding."

Falling back on the same, "We can't understand it but you have to believe in it anyway," argument is intellectually bankrupt. I believe in science because science is based on rigorously tested hypotheses and repeatable experiments that produce repeatable results. There is a chain of logic that we CAN understand, and it holds up. The evidence for evolution and an Earth billions of years old is overwhelming.

Floyd: "Either God is who He says He is, with powers far beyond man's ability to comprehend, or He is a myth and the entire Bible has no basis in fact."

Bingo! I'm glad we can agree on something!

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. In this case, claiming that a 600-year-old man built a ship that couldn't be built in the time given, without the needed technology, to hold an impossible number of impossible-to-gather animals, to house and feed them through a geologically and meteorologically impossible catastrophe, for which no empirical evidence exists - that's a lot of impossibles. That's an extraordinary claim.

If you tell me that your evidence is a book of ancient myths, written by nomadic tribesmen, that's not a very credible proof. If you tell me that all those impossibles were made possible because your invisible, omnipotent magician in the sky magically made them possible, that strains credulity as well.

Saying the Bible is true because it says it is presents a textbook example of circular reasoning. Sorry, but just because you choose to believe ancient myths doesn't constitute evidence that can speak of intellectual honesty.

Except that, according to the Bible, God DID put a man - Noah - quite literally at the helm! God had Noah build the ark; he didn't build it for Noah. He had Noah gather the animals - including anacondas and tapirs from South America, pronghorns and rattlesnakes from North America, kangaroos and koalas and platypuses from Australia - quite a feat, especially before the ark sailed! It doesn't say God did those things - it says he told Noah to do them. And then, somehow, they were all redistributed afterward.

If you insist on resorting to miracles, why not just simplify everything and say God kept Noah and his family and the desired animals miraculously alive? The Hebrews who wrote and believed the story had no idea that the Earth was as big as it is, nor how many kinds of animals Noah would need to deal with. With their limited knowledge, the story was plausible.

We know better. Without convolutions of logic far beyond the breaking point, it simply can't work. The only reason for insisting on literal belief in this ancient myth is because fundamentalism insists on it. If that's your thing, enjoy it, but at least have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge it.

I'm really curious; maybe the true believers can help me out here: The ark in Kentucky took over 1000 craftsmen about two years to build, which makes 2000 man-years of labor - most likely at least with modern steel saws and drills, if not power tools. It includes 3,300,000 board feet of lumber. If the biblical ark was actually built by one old man and his three grown sons, how long would it take?

According to Genesis, Noah was 500 years old when he had three sons - I guess they didn't want to rush into parenting, but then they got triplets! And he was 600 years old when the flood came - he liked to do things in nice round centuries. So the four men had 100 years - makes 400 man-years, most likely with tools of bronze at best. That means they must have worked five times as fast as the Kentucky crew - and that's not even accounting for the time to gather all the animals from six continents.

Toss in the dinosaurs, the fossil record going back half a billion years, and it sure takes a leap of faith to swallow it all...

My mother has faith. Faith seems to be the ability to believe something in the face of clear evidence to the contrary.

I am SO jealous! I've read that the Corsair is a very difficult restoration, much more involved than a P-51 or Spitfire.

Is it being restored for static display or to fly? What museum is this?