“If there is a textbook example of being irrational, then irrationality believes in something without any evidence.” – Atheist reference to Christianity
What about the seemingly universal belief, in most of academia, in evolution? Do they truly have proof of something evolving into another type/kind of animal? Is there a fossil of an evolutionary form that anyone can recognize as being between (transitional form) from one animal and another?
The most famous claim that I am aware of is that whales came from hippo-sized land animals many millions of years ago, and yet there is not one fossil that has been found that shows such a transformation. It didn’t happen overnight, because evolution takes millions of years, right? This “hippo” just didn’t jump into the ocean and its legs automatically shrank to the size of flippers?! Irrationality and insanity go hand in hand it seems. Thinking that just by belief and the so-called “fact” that there is no evidence for such a thing happening automatically makes evolution the correct assumption! Really?!?
Come on, if there was a shred of evidence that I could look at and perceive that one animal is changing/evolving into another, then I would believe it. But, there isn’t!
The statement at the beginning of this article is really a definition for a type of faith, so this person is not talking of irrationality it is really a jab at Christianity. Actually, it is a definition of “blind faith”, the kind which goes along with things like theories that have no proof but if enough people teach it for long enough it is taken as fact.
Christian faith is not blind faith, it is backed up by history and by eyewitness accounts from historical documents, so the recorded stories in the Bible (Old and New Testaments) can be traced to historically documents and other proofs. Can anyone show proof positive that evolutionary processes took place to create man or are those skeletons just skeletons of apes from thousands of years ago?
I don’t think that there will be any such evidence because it doesn’t exist! Many of the biological life that has been on earth since its creation are still in the same forms that they always were to begin with, so where is the proof of evolution?
Belief in evolution is backed up by this phrase: Insanity that is backed up by enough people to make it acceptable to all.
If you don’t want to believe in Christian beliefs or an afterlife or anything to do with the Bible, then do what most people do when they find something that they don’t like…change the channel! Don’t listen to Christian radio or to television programs that have things which you don’t agree with in them. That is exactly what Christians do! We try to tell people what our faith tells us to say, just as Muslims or Mormons do, but when we do it we are called insensitive, irrational, and narrow minded. Any other religion in the world is tolerated except Christianity.
So, if you want to be irrational then go ahead. I just want to ask one simple question: “What if my faith and its beliefs are right?”
In service to Him 
I know!
I once asked an atheist to give examples of fossil records that showed one kind of animal changing into another kind of animal (a cat into a dog, a dinosaur into a mammal, etc.).
ARCHEOPTERIX! he Web screamed triumphantly.
So after 4 billion years and a gazillions of bacteria, ticks, cockroaches, fish, sharks and Flipper the dolphin, there’s only one example in the fossil record of one kind of animal changing into another.
I call FREAK! not evolution.
Archeopterix did not change kinds. It was a feathered reptile which could fly. That is all.
Med,
Well I’ll be dog goned. That atheists fellow lied to me!
Actually it was a dinosaur with feathers – feathers are by definition an avian trait. And if you won’t accept archepteryx, what would you accept?
If you have enough faith to believe that you and everything on this earth came from one-celled organisms which evolved upward, I congratulate you on your great faith. I also apologize for offending you as well, if you will accept it.
You and I and every single species on this planet start out, in our own lifetime, as a single-celled organism which then divides and divides and divides and divides to form a complex colony of single-celled organisms we call a body. Open a science book some time. YOU were a single-celled organism at one point. So was every single one of your ancestors, from your parents to the first single-celled organism several billion years ago.
Science doesn’t require faith, and even if it did wouldn’t these “it takes more faith to believe…” lines creationists use be compliments? It is a bizarre form of projection that religious people so often use faith as an insult.
As for offending me, if you are genuine in your remorse just look at the evidence and think about it. I don’t care if you lose faith or become an atheist or even whether you accept the science of evolution, I honestly don’t care. But to look at reality with one eye shut in order to maintain a particular worldview is dishonest, and harmful, no matter what the worldview is or who is doing it. Truth matters, and we should care more about finding it than we care about not being uncomfortable.
Also, I asked what kind of fossil you would accept. If you don’t know then you don’t understand taxonomy and anatomy enough to judge whether a fossil is intermediate or not. Or you are just automatically going to reject anything no matter what it is.
In response to your comments about my education — “If you don’t know then you don’t understand taxonomy and anatomy enough to judge whether a fossil is intermediate or not.”
Truthfully, I don’t care whether you believe anything that I say on this matter, but I do have a B.S. degree in Clinical Laboratory Science (I worked in a hospital lab and yes, I did take Biology, Microbiology and Anatomy and Physiology) so I do know what a fossil and a transitional fossil should look like.
In regards to my worldview, it is perfectly fine without you or your opinion. My faith is intact, even though none of the so-called transitional fossils that are spoken of by you and most scientists are not. The fossil that was supposed to be of ambulocetus was a part of a skull bone and about half of the lower jaw, the rest was an artists drawing.
As far as caring whether you care or not, I do not. But, I do care about your soul whether you do or not and so does Christ. I am sorry that you feel the way that you do, but thank you for proving a point that I will use in my sermon on Sunday.
I asked you twice what kind of transitional fossil you would accept and said that (hypothetically) if you could not answer the question then you lacked the background to judge whether one was transitional. I did not say this as an insult or to be rude by the way, it’s just true. Your response was to then act like I insulted you, ignore the question again and patronize me. So you’ve shown me that you’re not ignorant. You know what you’re talking about. And you’re intellectually dishonest.
As for ambulocetus, creationist websites lie. A lot.
And I have replied to you that I have a scientific background. I do know what I am talking about and I am not going to be baited into another conversation on this subject. You believe what you want and I will too. Thank you for your opinion.
Yes, you could clarify what evidence you’re demanding, but you choose not to… out of principle or something.
That’s just it, I don’t need any evidence and I am not demanding anything. You have your beliefs and I have mine, that is all.
No, there are countless examples and everything in the fossil record is transitional between what came before and what comes after, the same way you are genetically transitional between your parents and your children. Archeopteryx and others like tiktaalik, ambulocetus etc are not simply transitional forms but rather major transitional forms that appear at the dawning of entire groups of species and have the traits of more than one group. They represent major forks in the road so to speak. Archeopteryx is a dinosaur that has bird traits – two years before it was discovered darwin wrote in Origin Of Species that if his theory was correct and birds descended from land animals then birds must have originally had separate digits in their wings like land animals – archeopteryx has five digits with claws in it’s feathered wings. It is a perfect intermediate.
If there are really “countless examples and everything in the fossil record is transitional” why aren’t there “countless examples” of transitional species today.
In fact there are no examples of transitional species today or in the fossil record and that means the statement “there are countless examples and everything in the fossil record is transitional,” is a false statement.
The past has to match the present and with regards to your claim about the fossil record and it doesn’t.
A fossil isn’t transition just because you claim that it is. Someone can make the same exact opposite claim.
The truth is found by matching the past with the present. And since your claim about the past does not match the present (there are no examples in the present of one kind of animal changing into another kind of animal), your claim is false.
There are many things to address in your comment. First of all you say there are no modern transitional forms. It is worth mentioning that the term transitional form as it is used in taxonomy is not applicable in the same way to modern species because a fossil species is intermediate between two groups which it, or species like it, descended into much later. It is in other words a great, great grandfather species to two or more modern species, or groups of species. So modern species would be intermediate between extinct ones and future ones, and we can hardly find species millions of years in the future to prove modern ones are intermediate between them. This doesn’t mean it’s not well established, any more than it’s not well established that we are intermediate between our parents and our children. Just as it is well shown that we have children and that they inherit our traits with variation, it is also well established that those variations are inherited at different rates which alter our genome and those of every other species. Anyway, another issue is the definition of a transitional form. Here is a brief description I just gave to someone else, if you would be so kind as to read it:
“There were many known transitional fossils in darwin’s time, and darwin specifically predicted several using his theory, some of which were proven correct over a century later. A transitional form is one that has some characteristics unique to two modern groups and therefore could have been a common ancestor (or more likely a cousin to a common ancestor) of both groups. If a fossil species has A, B and C characteristics diagnostic of one group of species and X, Y and Z characteristics diagnostic of another group of species, it is by definition a transitional fossil. The beauty of taxonomy is that it is objective, you group species according to their characteristics (ie these animals have legs, those animals have hair etc) and then when you’re done put all those groups within their parent groups (because for instance animals with hair also have legs) and it automatically produces a family tree pattern. That pattern can also be confirmed by turning back the pages of the fossil record, ie species with legs appear before species with hair or scales or any sub-set.”
As you can see it is not a matter of opinion, a species either has those characteristics or it doesn’t. It is only a matter of opinion to people who don’t know enough about comparative anatomy or fossils to objectively show that one species is actually intermediate or not.
As for living modern intermediates, what do you mean by that? Do you mean modern descendants of extinct species that have the characteristics of more than one group, like snakes which still have legs or the platypus, one of the few modern descendants of early mammals which has reptile and mammal traits? Or do you mean different species that blend together to form a spectrum? Every species does that, barring a few like the platypus which are the only surviving members of their group. For instance:
Did you know that horses are basically zebras that lost their stripes? How do we know this? Because some of them still retain a few of them, especially just after they’re born and in the womb. Is that what you mean? If you mean a dog giving birth to a cat or something like that, that isn’t how evolution works.