Today's "Living Fossils" Demonstrate STASIS - a Powerful Discriminant in Selection of Creation as the Right Answer in the Origins Debate

Greetings to faithful friends, passionate foes, occasional casual observers, and surfers who may have simply landed here on a freak wave ...

Where to begin today?

First I suppose I am hoping the Oregon State Beavers football team defeats the Oregon Ducks this coming weekend and puts them out of their misery. As I watched a mediocre UCLA Bruins team grind the justly proud but injury-riddled Ducks into the Rose Bowl turf Saturday, I was thinking that if the game had been a Las Vegas prize fight, it would have been stopped halfway through. Maybe the barely limping Ducks can be rewarded with a bowl game that can't afford television cameras so they can close out what had been a stunningly entertaining and successful season in merciful solitude. I mean, mercy killing is still legal in Oregon, isn't it?

Now, REALLY where to begin today?

So much to say, let's just cut to the chase. The dead deluder Darwin's delusional nonsense continues to be exposed in the light of observed fact. Sir Charles mused that nature's way was continual - you might even say dynamic - change over time to transform bugs into linebackers. In fact, when folks by their Darwinian religion choose to exclude purposeful divine creation from the origins debate, then the only choice left is that nature's way must be continual dynamic change. But the existence of bazillions - give or take a few - of life forms that remain virtually unchanged over alleged millions of years are powerful proofs joined in flesh and stone that Darwin is not only dead, but Darwin is DEAD WRONG.

Note that purposeful exclusion of fiat creation by Darwin and his fanatically factophobic followers is NOT inherently scientific. It is inherently religious. The difference is that Christianity is religion with revelation (lots of light) while Darwinism is religion without revelation (lots of dark).

BTW, "fiat" creation means (approximately) that God did it all with a six-day snap of the fingers.

And now ...

On to the details ....

The truly wise will seek to understand the nature, purpose, and destiny of mankind, and these must be ultimately grounded in our origin. The list of choices is not overwhelmingly long. In fact, it really is pretty simple.

Choice # 1 (preferred): From God's Word the Bible we learn that life and the history of life can be characterized by (1) fiat creation (abrupt appearance), and (2) God's sustaining power in a fallen universe (stasis with gradual decay).

Choice # 2 (you can go this way but the eternal consequences are quite grim): Darwin's idea of (1) gradual appearance and (2) continual change.

If you are interested in an earlier touch on this, go to:

http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2007/08/these-chemical-responses-have-been.html

So you can now say, "Hey, Undertaker, this is cool. With the characterizations so clear, we can now begin to apply a decision-theoretic framework like modern edjicated engineers. We can apply well-defined discriminants (abrupt appearance, stasis) in order to select good-better-compelling answers from bad-worse-fugeddaboudit non-answers." And the Undertaker replies, "Now you got it, kid."

And the answer comes stunningly simply and swiftly. Any fair characterization of the history of life as found in both the fossil record and in living things is: (1) abrupt appearance (e.g., the so-called "Cambrian explosion"), and (2) stasis ("living fossils", now also known as Lazarus taxa).

Poof! Darwin is gone. Voila! God wins.

Whispering ... actually, there was never really any contest. Some people just thought there was.

And if you have questions about characterizing the fossil record by abrupt appearance and stasis, see:

Gish, Duane T., Evolution: The Fossils Still say NO!, Institute for Creation Research, 1995. 391 pp.

...

My motivation for engaging in this post? I am sitting here with my recent (November 17, 2007) copy of Science News open to an article titled "BACK FROM THE DEAD? 'Resurrections' of long-missing species lead to revelations." You can find it on the web (but you will need to be a SN subscriber to read the entire text) at:

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20071117/bob8ref.asp.

The article discusses species that are known from the fossil record and have now been found living today virtually unchanged. SN says:

"The apparent resurrections ... long-missing species have led scientists to give such living fossils another name: Lazarus taxa, after the beggar who was raised from the dead in a biblical parable. In the strictest sense, the modern representative of a Lazarus taxon belongs to the same species that disappeared from the fossil record many years ago. More loosely, researchers apply the term Lazarus taxon to the extremely close kin of ancient apparent extinctions."

Examples in the article include:

(1) the coelacanth is a lobe-finned fish known from fossils in rocks (allegedly) more than 75 million years old. Scientists were stunned to discover a living coelacanth pulled out of the Indian Ocean in 1938. Since then, the coelacanth has been observed or caught in waters from South Africa to Indonesia.

(2) One of the world's rarest trees was discovered in Australia in 1994. "The trees, dubbed Wollemi pines, were later identified as surviving relatives of a species long presumed extinct - in other words, a Lazarus taxon."

(3) "Glass sponges are so called because their skeletons are built from glasslike silica minerals, not carbonates. ... Such reef-building glass sponges disappeared from the fossil record about 120 million years ago, about the same time that daitoms ... first appeared." Living glass sponges have now been discovered in deep ocean waters off the coast of Canada in the 1990s and off the coast of Wshington State in 2005.

When I read the SN article, it definitely had a familiar ring to it. I had already read about the coelacanth from numerous creationist sources over the last 30 years (see for example Creation 15(4):45,September 1993):

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v15/i4/livingfossils.asp

Also, the discovery of the "living fossil" Wollemi pine I read about in Creation magazine in 1995: Creation 17(2):13. March 1995. See also:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v17/i2/tree.asp

So this "living fossil" business is not something new at all. In fact, for a period in the 1990s, each issue of Creation magazine showed examples of living fossils, courtesy of Dr Joachim Schevenin in Germany. Dr. Schevenin, as of 1993, was overseeing the world’s largest collection of living fossils in his faith-funded creation museum Lebendige Vorwelt at Unterm Hagen 22, D-58119 Hagen, Germany. As I recall, Dr. Scheven had several hundred examples of "living fossils" on display.

So is all this just religion-crazed creationist fanatics trying to use smoke and mirrors to create a sense of creation in the origins debate? Nope, not me. I am religion-motivated - but enthused rather than fanatic, rational and in-right-mind rather than crazed.

Even the modern king of evolutionary flim-flam, Richard Dawkins, reluctantly admitted that abrupt appearance gives substantial credence to the creation hypothesis. The prominent British evolutionist, speaking of the Cambrian fauna, made the following comment:

"And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists". Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton Co., 1987), as quoted in Creation 15(4):45, September 1993.

This by the Professor Dawkins who had to resort to a deceitfully flawed argument in his infamous "Methinks it is a weasel" synthesis to argue the reasonableness of chance evolution. Enough of this fraudulent fellow. See point B.1 in:

http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2007/04/gimme-break-man-i-really-do-have-life.html

So is belief in creation important to be a Christian?

Absolutely. The message of the Bible is that we have been created in the image of God with the express purpose of reflecting that image. God desires that we live with Him in eternity, and gave his Only Begotten Son, Jesus, as a sacrifice to redeem us from our own sins and failures. And the one who gave himself, Jesus Christ, is called "The Author of Life" by Peter as he spoke to the the Jews in Jerusalem:

"You killed the Author of Life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this." (Acts 3:15).

And speaking about Jesus to the Christians in Colosse, Paul wrote:

"For by him (Jesus) all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. And he is the head of the body, the church." (Colossians 1:16-17a).

So to reject creation is to reject the Creator. Does that make these discriminants (abrupt appearance and stasis) important? Yeah, very important. May the wise heed.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.