Genesis 1:21
“And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.”
A small boy was asked in class, “What family does the whale belong to?” Nervously, he replied, “I don’t know, sir. No family on our street has one!”
What the teacher was getting at was the evolutionary idea that whales have evolved from land mammals. In London’s Natural History Museum, one display cabinet shows a mesonychid, thought to be a land-dwelling ancestor, on the left, a fossil of a modern-type dolphin on the right, and in the middle there is a supposed intermediate form – an ambulocetus.
The display is clearly meant to show the evolution of the whale from the wolf-like mesonychid, through the ambulocetus, to the modern whale. One would confidently expect, therefore, that the oldest fossil on display would be the mesonychid. And one would be wrong!
The oldest of the three fossils is actually the ambulocetus. This is a huge problem because the NHM has to justify why it has arranged these three fossils that way. Their justification is this; the ambulocetus is one of the first of its kind, so they draw an error bar accordingly. On the other hand, they have decided that the mesonychid is one of the last of its kind, so its error bar shows that the fossil displayed in the NHM is from just before the species became extinct. The reason for producing such asymmetric error bars? Well, the fossils must be in that order because that is the order in which they have evolved. In other words, they have been arranged according to an evolutionary worldview. Then, the arrangement is offered as a proof for that worldview. This is circular reasoning.
Prayer: In Your word, Lord, You were clear about how everything happened. Thank You for your great wisdom, displayed throughout creation. Amen.
Author: Paul F. Taylor
Ref: Wells, J. (2017), Zombie Science, (Discovery Institute), pp. 100-103. Image: Nobu Tamura, License: Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 International.
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