"Everyone knows that The Flintstones was wrong"
With some rather sad exceptions...
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/1999/11/05/dinosaurs-and-the-bible
http://creationmuseum.org/whats-here/exhibits/#dinosaur-den
Flintstones was (sort of) true: Mammals did well alongside dinosaurs
Everyone knows that The Flintstones was wrong: not only did humans and dinosaurs not exist at the same time, even our earliest mammalian ancestors had barely come upon the world stage at the time when the great lizards departed it. Not so, says paleontologist Gregory Wilson. He and his fellow bone-botherers have been probing …
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Thursday 15th March 2012 10:24 GMT SuperTim
Re: "Everyone knows that The Flintstones was wrong"
Looking at the first link:
"According to evolutionists, the dinosaurs “ruled the Earth” for 140 million years, dying out about 65 million years ago. However, scientists do not dig up anything labeled with those ages. They only uncover dead dinosaurs (i.e., their bones), and their bones do not have labels attached telling how old they are."
I love how they skirt the fact that the fossils are NOT MADE OUT OF BONE, but as much rock as their surroundings, taking millions of years to get this way! But why let facts spoil a good story?
Gotta love the religious blinkers they wear.
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Thursday 15th March 2012 11:21 GMT DrXym
Re: "Everyone knows that The Flintstones was wrong"
Creationists, especially young earth creationists like to infiltrate geology almost as much as they like to infiltrate biology. They hope if they can cast doubt on the time required for rock formations to occur (e.g. the billion+ years of deposits exposed by erosion in the Grand Canyon) that somehow it casts doubt on the fossil record and by extension evolution.
The problem for them is they are confronted with literally mountains of evidence. As in actual mountains. And they all demonstrate the enormous amounts of time required for formations to occur and all demonstrate a consistency in the fossil record.
As one might expect creationists go for the smoke and mirrors attempting to nit pick, misinterpret data or make unsupported findings in the hope that if they confuse people enough that somehow their evidence lite other-explanation wins. It doesn't of course but it doesn't stop the nonsense getting parrotted over and over.
The best resource by far for looking up this stuff is http://www.talkorigins.org/ where pretty much every major and minor creationist talking point has been methodically ground to dust.
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Friday 16th March 2012 03:52 GMT P. Lee
Re: "Everyone knows that The Flintstones was wrong"
"Infiltrate"? Seriously? What are they, a terrorist cell? Is this an episode of "24"?
While I would agree that CMI is overzealous, the issue comes down to presuppositions. Creationists pre-suppose the existence of the supernatural, despite the fact that you can't measure the super-natural using natural laws. Evolution (as portrayed by Atheists) pre-suppose that there is no God, despite the fact that science runs out of answers when it comes to "how did life begin" and the Big Bang, where natural laws, by definition, were not in play. They have blind faith that Science will find the answer one day, despite their protestations of objectivity.
There is a further problem. Evolutionists take on a religious fervour. They make stuff up to fill in the gaps, in much the same way that the Church did in medieval times regarding the earth being the centre of the universe. There may be mountains of evidence, but when a trial which got evolution into schools was later found to be based on fake "proof", when the half-dinosaur-half-bird from China turns out to be fake (as if we didn't see that coming...), when "Lucy" turns out to be very much like a tree-dweller and really not at all like a human, people feel cheated. When National Geographic provides artists impressions which combine human and ape features, which don't actually correlate to the evidence found, then we have a problem. When people are told the Grand Canyon absolutely must have taken millions of years to create, but then notice that you can get similar effects with large volumes of water moving rapidly in other places, then people do feel justified in questioning the science.
A classic creationist view of the processes evolutionary science uses is at http://creation.com/the-pigs-took-it-all I don't know if it is a misrepresentation and it doesn't make an effort to shoehorn the dating into 6k years. However, it does make the point that the dating is not as objective as is generally portrayed. There is something to be said for putting the caveats found in scholarly articles into the popular science representations. Otherwise you end up with situations like the climategate fiasco, which doesn't help anyone.
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Friday 16th March 2012 09:21 GMT Pascal Monett
Re: "people do feel justified in questioning the science"
There is no problem in questioning the science, science itself is doing that every day.
The problem is when you question the science, refuse to even try to understand the answers and go back to whacking a log in search of your own version.
The argument that science presupposes that there is no God is getting stale. Whether there is a God or not (and I am convinced that there is), this Universe has rules that demand to be understood. Saying "God did it" is something the Romans did to explain volcanoes, lightning and the rest of the things they could not comprehend. It does not help in understanding those phenomena.
Therefor creationists are the Romans of our time, and they should be rightfully scorned for the pathetically limited view they have of the Universe.
The Universe is complex, deal with it.
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Friday 16th March 2012 11:52 GMT DrXym
Re: "Everyone knows that The Flintstones was wrong"
""Infiltrate"? Seriously? What are they, a terrorist cell? Is this an episode of "24"?"
Yes infiltrate. Creationism / ID frequently attempts to bolster its scientific credentials and give themselves a veneer of credibility by infiltrating actual science conferences or publications often under false pretenses.
One example:
http://www.earthmagazine.org/article/creationism-creeps-mainstream-geology
Another:
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2012/02/springer-gets-s.html
Apparently this is a fairly common occurrence and the intent of this is clear. They hope if they can pass themselves off as scientists that ID somehow stands on an even footing and they can "teach the controversy".
As for the rest of your post, attempting to equate science with creationism is ludicrous. Science happily states "we don't know" when confronted with something that it doesn't know. It might hypothesize an explanation but unless that explanation is testable it will not become a theory. So someone might hypothesize Lucy walked upright but if new evidence were to appear that discounts that explanation then science will change to accommodate it. Continental drift was hypothesized to have occurred but only with evidence to test the idea with did it become the theory of plate tectonics. Science is self correcting in other words and incorporates new ideas and discards old ones all the time.
Evolution is a theory which is put to the test every time a new fossil is dug up or some major advance such as genetics comes along. The fact that evolution has held for 150 years and is supported by new discoveries suggests it is an extremely strong theory. Evolution is also more than a theory, it's a fact since it can be observed (e.g. by selective breeding).
It is true that the general public does not always understand the nuances of science, and sometimes the presentation of it is lacking. For example creative licence might be taken to present what a dinosaur looks like which is later determined to be incorrect. That isn't a failing of the research, but in the manner which science is communicated and in the way it is distorted by opponents (e.g. "it's only a theory").
So no science is not a faith or religion. It works from evidence.
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Thursday 15th March 2012 12:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "Everyone knows that The Flintstones was wrong"
A few years' ago I did a helicopter tour of the grand canyon. The pilot was a young earth creationist. He had a lot of crackpot theories, but the funniest was he claimed that the moon was drifting away from the earth at a particular rate, and if you extrapolated that rate back, the moon would crash into the earth 6000 year ago. Therefore, he had "proved" the earth couldn't be more than 6000 years old.
It was interesting fighting the inner turmoil. Me and my friend wanted to shout the guy down vociferously. Unfortunately, he was our pilot. So eventually I called bullshit and asked him to stop spouting crap, but took the whole thing up afterwards in a complaint to the company.
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Thursday 15th March 2012 13:07 GMT Armando 123
Not a shock
It's been known for a while that, at the end of the Cretaceous, things were going poorly for the dinosaurs. There were fewer species in the big-herbivore and big carnivore niches; species were disappearing faster than they were appearing. This is certainly true in North America; the Hell Creek formations in Montana show this pretty conclusively. There may have been multiple reasons for this: changing climate, disease, new plants arising, etc. The asteroid that hit the Yucatan might have been a coup de gras, but the dinosaurs were fading well before then. That a mammal was 'stepping up' at this time isn't surprising, but it does show that the dinosaurs were indeed not doing well; that a therapsid/mammal was getting bigger after tens of millions of years of being marginalized shows just how things were changing.
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Thursday 15th March 2012 16:06 GMT Citizen Kaned
OH.....MY.....GOD
bat-shit crazy cut and paste coming in from one of the top links
"Other scientists, called creation scientists, have a different idea about when dinosaurs lived. They believe they can solve any of the supposed dinosaur mysteries and show how the evidence fits wonderfully with their ideas about the past, beliefs that come from the Bible.
The Bible, God’s very special book (or collection of books, really), claims that each writer was supernaturally inspired to write exactly what the Creator of all things wanted him to write down for us so that we can know where we (and dinosaurs) came from, why we are here, and what our future will be. The first book in the Bible—Genesis—teaches us many things about how the universe and life came into existence. Genesis tells us that God created everything—the Earth, stars, sun, moon, plants, animals, and the first two people.
Although the Bible does not tell us exactly how long ago it was that God made the world and its creatures, we can make a good estimate of the date of creation by reading through the Bible and noting some interesting passages:
God made everything in six days. He did this, by the way, to set a pattern for mankind, which has become our seven day week (as described in Exodus 20:11). God worked for six days and rested for one, as a model for us. Furthermore, Bible scholars will tell you that the Hebrew word for day used in Genesis 1, can only mean an ordinary day in this context.
We are told God created the first man and woman—Adam and Eve—on Day Six. Many facts about when their children and their children’s children were born are given in Genesis. These genealogies are recorded throughout the Old Testament, up until the time of Christ. They certainly were not chronologies lasting millions of years.
As you add up all of the dates, and accepting that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came to Earth almost 2000 years ago, we come to the conclusion that the creation of the Earth and animals (including the dinosaurs) occurred only thousands of years ago (perhaps only 6000!), not millions of years. Thus, if the Bible is right (and it is!), dinosaurs must have lived within the past thousands of years."
LMAO... some people eh? doesnt China alone have more than 6000 years of history easily accessible?
i love the way he says as we add up the dates and then just plucks 6000 years from his religious arse.... its scary to think that these numpties are forcing this shite on children (and some really stupid adults)
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Thursday 15th March 2012 19:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: OH.....MY.....GOD
"We are told God created the first man and woman—Adam and Eve—on Day Six. Many facts about when their children and their children’s children were born are given in Genesis. These genealogies are recorded throughout the Old Testament, up until the time of Christ. They certainly were not chronologies lasting millions of years."
And none of them were named Fred or Wilma so that *proves* that humans never lived alongside dinosaurs.
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Friday 16th March 2012 12:35 GMT some vaguely opinionated bloke
Re: OH.....MY.....GOD
"... Bible scholars will tell you that the Hebrew word for day used in Genesis 1, can only mean an ordinary day in this context."
"We are told God created the first man and woman—Adam and Eve—on Day Six. Many facts about when their children and their children’s children were born are given in Genesis. These genealogies are recorded throughout the Old Testament, up until the time of Christ. They certainly were not chronologies lasting millions of years."
... so if days really were days, then years really were years, thus proving that Methuselah really lived for 969 years...
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Thursday 15th March 2012 19:43 GMT JEDIDIAH
...a little self-evident.
This is a little self evident. If mammals were in a position to take advantage of climate change and the fall of the dinosaurs, they needed to be around already and flourishing in the fringes in some niche that the dinosaurs were not well adapted for.
There's a wide range possible between zero mammals and dominating the planet.
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Friday 16th March 2012 13:32 GMT cyborg
"Evolution (as portrayed by Atheists) pre-suppose that there is no God, despite the fact that science runs out of answers when it comes to "how did life begin" and the Big Bang, where natural laws, by definition, were not in play. They have blind faith that Science will find the answer one day, despite their protestations of objectivity."
No.
There is no requirement that the Scientific Method answers any particular question.
There is also no requirement that the definition of "natural laws" rules out anything relating to events not within the context of The Big Bang. There is simply likely no way to gather any information to support any hypothesis anyone may like to make about such things.
"There is a further problem. Evolutionists take on a religious fervour. They make stuff up to fill in the gaps, in much the same way that the Church did in medieval times regarding the earth being the centre of the universe."
No.
"Making stuff up" is not the same as extrapolating from existing data then searching for additional information to confirm or disprove that extrapolation. The former becomes dogma and unchanging, the later merely becomes the next frontier of scientific discovery.
"There may be mountains of evidence, but when a trial which got evolution into schools was later found to be based on fake "proof", when the half-dinosaur-half-bird from China turns out to be fake (as if we didn't see that coming...), when "Lucy" turns out to be very much like a tree-dweller and really not at all like a human, people feel cheated. "
No. Just not even true in the slightest; evolution was not "got into schools" by any trial. The inaccuracy of the rest of the post is moot by this simple point.
"When National Geographic provides artists impressions which combine human and ape features, which don't actually correlate to the evidence found, then we have a problem."
No. This is no more a problem than drawing a picture of a hypothetical lizard man, or an exoplanent. If you don't understand that "Arists Impression" != "Scientific Evidence" then I cannot help you.
Now I have no idea about geology because frankly it doesn't interest me but if one is going to have objections on the pretence that "The Science" isn't accurate then it would behove them to actually find out if their talking points aren't complete bollards.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
