Christians and Dinosaurs

[Guest peebumble]

Christians try so hard to make their lies seem real.

 

 

http://www.jabberwockee.com/archives/2005/...dinosaurs_1.php

[Mr. Neil]

I think the whole dinosaur thing makes me mad more than their lies about evolution. I love dinosaurs. I love learning new things about them.

 

The dinosaurs represent a major vertebrate group that is no longer with us. Imagine if fish or reptiles died out, and you get some idea of what Earth has lost. Our own biological window into the world of dinosaurs is the window that looks out upon the trees in our yard. There the birds sing, completely oblivious that they are the echoes of the most remarkable creatures to have ever walked the Earth.

 

What I don't like is when people lie about dinosaurs. Faced with inconvenience of these strange fossils, apologists are forced to come up with explanations; unfortunately, all of which happen to be quite terrible.

 

The sneaky ones, like Mr. Kent Hovind, think they can kill two birds with one stone by by saying that the Bible talks about dinosaurs when it mentions dragons, Behemoth, or Leviathan. Though intellectually dishonest, this is understandable behavior for Mr. Hovind. After all, if what he's trying to do is demonstrate the Bible's legitimacy by inserting dinosaurs, it's only logical that he'd take advantage of any chance to eliminate those more embarrassing mythical creatures from within its pages. Now if only Hovind had a way to do away with the satyrs and unicorns.

 

Saying that dragons were the dinosaurs is quite the laugh, though, as it reveals the limited knowledge-base of the topic that Mr. Hovind has. Hovind would have you believe that dinosaurs were just large reptiles, akin to those in the 1920s film The Lost World, based on the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Hey, dragons were just huge reptiles, so it sounds like a perfect match! I would hasten to ask Mr. Hovind if a miasaur looks like a dragon to him, or perhaps a velociraptor, a creature no taller than his knees. Creationists often forget that dinosaurs came in all sizes and that not all dinosaurs were ferocious, dagger-toothed monstrosities.

 

The dragon is a prominant mythological creature throughout many cultures in Europe and Asia. While dragons might be comparable to the larger meat-eaters like T-rex or Giganotosaurus, they nonetheless have their own unique appearance that is quite distinguishable from dinosaurs. One who is not blinded by desperate apologetic methodology could not possibly mistake one for the other. That is, of course, unless the Christian apologist would like us to believe that ancient artists were incompetent and could draw every creatures accurately accept for the dinosaurs, which they kept drawing with a head like a crocodile, the spindly spine of a snake, and the appendage configuration of a mammal. This is not what dinosaurs look like.

 

It's also worth mentioning that the most dragon-like of all dinosaurs, the larger predators, were not to be found in Europe. The T-rex was a North American animal, and Giganotosaurus lived in South America. The Chinese would have had T-rex's lesser-known cousin, the Tarbosaurus, but looking at serpent-like depictions of ancient Chinese dragons, one immediately becomes aware of the problem. There's no way that the dragon myth is based on dinosaurs.

 

To cap off Hovind's astonishing ignorance of dinosaurs, one needs only to point his browser toward drdino.com to behold the most basic of errors by creationists. Up in the top left-hand corner of his site, you'll see a sauropod dinosaur with its tail on the ground. Aparently, Hovind has never seen sauropod footprints before, as no tail marks are to be found. This is a fairly common blunder among creationists, as they can't help but think that dinosaurs are big, stupid reptiles, and therefore, their tails must drag on the ground.

 

The fact that science once thought of dinosaurs this way was only due to a virgining knowledge-base of the early 20th century, but while the scientifically literate have marched forward bravely in our knowledge about dinosaurs, creationists curiously have not. Their depictions of dinosaurs are locked in the early-to-mid part of the 20th century, as reflected by their choice of reference material. I would like to believe that creationists just don't understand the tentativeness of science and therefore assume that scientific publications are timeless, much like the dogma of their religion, but I can't help but assume that the reason they use outdated references is because they know that if they appealed to any modern, peer-reviewed articles about discoveries in dinosaur fossils, they would immediately reveal to the audience that creationism is wrong.

 

Kent Hovind claims that he loves dinosaurs. I think he secretly hates them. He hates them, because they stubbornly refuse to be what he wants them to be. He shuns the one singing in the tree outside his window. He shakes his fist at Sinosauropteryx for being a dinosaur that's just a little too much like a bird, and at Archeopteryx for being a bird that's just a little too much like a dinosaur. And I'm sure he wishes that Mircrocraptor gui would have stayed in the quarry and never been discovered. And I'm sure he's miffed at Ovaraptor, for being such a good birdlike mother as to clutch its eggs in death only to be preserved and found in that position.

 

I have a tough time keeping my cool with creationists when talking about dinosaurs. While it can be really funny watching them make shit up, it just makes me mad how they try to defeat learning because they're too damn selfish to give up their idiotic creation and flood myths.

 

I would pay real money to see a dinosaur bite Ken Ham's head, like it appears to be doing in that picture.

[txviper]

Anomalies. I love anomalies. Science has lost track of it, but the truth is that any theory that cannot accomodate anomlies is simply wrong.

 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7285683

[crazy-tiger]

So we should just throw it out then? Is that what you're trying to say?

 

 

Get real you dense twat... All it shows is that the current theory is incorrect on that detail. No theory is final... all are subject to new discoveries.

 

Try to get this through the excessive amount of bone surrounding your brain... Science doesn't work like Religion!

 

 

 

Dickhead...

[Mr. Neil]

Again, you reveal that you have the scientific understanding of a child, viper. Actually, I take that back, as it's an insult to children. Children are much more adept at using intellectual faculties than you're displaying here.

 

I'd like to correct you one one point, if I may. A theory that cannot account for anomolies is every theory in science. You don't just throw theories away, especially if they've worked perfectly up until now. You refine theories to account for the new evidence and then test it again.

 

But as far as the soft dinosaur tissue is concerned, so what? What's your argument? That you don't think soft tissue would last 65 million years? Should the convergant evidences of many different branches of science be ignored because of one strange fossil find? Oh, and by the way, it was fossilized.

 

Perhaps you can specify precisely what the problem is. If the preservation of soft tissue strikes you as somewhat peculiar, then I would beg to ask why creationists weren't blowing the whistle about insects and small amphibians preserved in amber. Perhaps you could explain why you find it difficult that one part of a fossil would be less fossilized than the rest of it.

[txviper]

"you don't think soft tissue would last 65 million years?"

 

 

Well, hmmmmm...gosh...let me think about that...maybe...I guess if....

 

 

HELL NO! Do you?!!

[crazy-tiger]

"you don't think soft tissue would last 65 million years?"

 

 

Well, hmmmmm...gosh...let me think about that...maybe...I guess if....

 

 

HELL NO! Do you?!!

Of course not... You're a YEC who believes the Universe is less than 10,000 years old on the say-so of a book that contradicts itself, contains blatent errors, contradicts reality, contradicts history, and contains faked works...

 

 

Do I think anyone could trust that? HELL NO! Do you?!! (and if you do, you're a fucking moron)

[Mr. Neil]

"you don't think soft tissue would last 65 million years?"

 

 

Well, hmmmmm...gosh...let me think about that...maybe...I guess if....

 

 

HELL NO! Do you?!!

Thank you for proving my point. I asked you to specifically explain what the problem was, and you don't even know where to begin. What it breaks down into is txviper saying, "I don't think it could happen."

 

Again, explain why soft tissue wouldn't have lasted 65 million years. What's the problem? Surely if this is a problem for the great ages of the Earth, then you can explain it. Bear in mind that simply asserting that it wouldn't have been preserved is not an explanation.

[txviper]

"...explain why soft tissue wouldn't have lasted 65 million years. What's the problem? Surely if this is a problem for the great ages of the Earth, then you can explain it. Bear in mind that simply asserting that it wouldn't have been preserved is not an explanation"

 

 

“Our theories of how fossils are preserved don’t allow for this,” says professor Mary H. Schweitzer, one of the scientists studying the thigh bone.

 

A paleontologist from UC Berkeley, Kevin Padian, admits, “The conventional wisdom has been that you can’t get residues like this after 10,000 years.”

[Taphophilia]

"...explain why soft tissue wouldn't have lasted 65 million years. What's the problem? Surely if this is a problem for the great ages of the Earth, then you can explain it. Bear in mind that simply asserting that it wouldn't have been preserved is not an explanation"

 

 

“Our theories of how fossils are preserved don’t allow for this,” says professor Mary H. Schweitzer, one of the scientists studying the thigh bone.

 

A paleontologist from UC Berkeley, Kevin Padian, admits, “The conventional wisdom has been that you can’t get residues like this after 10,000 years.”

 

 

 

I can see where this is going.

Mr. Neil, you need this to hand txviper his ass.

[Mr. Neil]

You didn't answer my challenge, viper. Again, you're trying to distract me with your smokescreens, and now you're trying to quote-mine your way out of the hole you're digging. You don't even know what it is that they discovered, do you?

 

Last chance, viper. Identify a specific problem with the dino tissue. Explain. If you don't, I promise you that my next response will not be pretty. And you know what I can do. I've thoroughly embarassed you on this forum, and I have no problem doing it again.

[Vigile]

Anomalies. I love anomalies. Science has lost track of it, but the truth is that any theory that cannot accomodate anomlies is simply wrong.

 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7285683

 

Got quite a handle on your understanding of statistical significance haven't you tx? By your reasoning every pharmaceutical known to mankind doesn't work since anomolies and statistical outliers exist in the testing of all of them. Why do you xtians insist on holding to your binary logic when it is so easily destroyed?

[crazy-tiger]

“Our theories of how fossils are preserved don’t allow for this,” says professor Mary H. Schweitzer, one of the scientists studying the thigh bone.

 

A paleontologist from UC Berkeley, Kevin Padian, admits, “The conventional wisdom has been that you can’t get residues like this after 10,000 years.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's usually a good idea to say where the quotes are from... it helps to stop accusations of just making the damn things up or quote-mining them.

Of course, it can also show that you've quote-mined... quite a quandry, isnt it?

 

Still, please supply references for these quotes...

[narcissist]

There's conventional wisdom.

 

Then there's science. And how often has science dumfounded and demonstrated the folly of "conventional wisdom" throughout history?

 

Personally, I would like to see a dinosaur eat a Christian, specifically a YEC.

 

(My 2c. on with the show...)

[Mr. Neil]

“Our theories of how fossils are preserved don’t allow for this,” says professor Mary H. Schweitzer, one of the scientists studying the thigh bone.

 

A paleontologist from UC Berkeley, Kevin Padian, admits, “The conventional wisdom has been that you can’t get residues like this after 10,000 years.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's usually a good idea to say where the quotes are from... it helps to stop accusations of just making the damn things up or quote-mining them.

Of course, it can also show that you've quote-mined... quite a quandry, isnt it?

 

Still, please supply references for these quotes...

It matters not. I already found the article where he got both quotes.

 

http://www.worldview.org/blog/index.php?p=102

 

And I know that's where he got them, because of the way one of the quotes happens to be edited from its original context.

 

Typical creationist. He gets his material from an apologetic source and doesn't bother to investigate the context of the statement he's reading. This will come back to haunt txviper as I hand him his ass in my next reply.

 

Viper, you are soooo about to be bitched.

[crazy-tiger]

I've done a little digging around... (yeah, bad pun) Isn't it interesting to find out that soft tissue from Dino fossils was found, 7 years before this article, in Italy? That it's also been found in Brazil, 9 years ago? That it's been found in China? That detailed examination of soft tissue found in fossils has been carried out since the mid 90's? That's it's not just a one-off?

 

 

Makes you wonder just how much that article actually got right...

[txviper]

65,000,000 years. Push the reset button and do some thinking.

[crazy-tiger]

Must... Believe... Flawed... And... Faked... Bible...

 

Must... Not... Understand... Anything...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyone got any popcorn? This is going to be fun...

[Flyby Stardancer]

Anyone got any popcorn? This is going to be fun...

 

(hands over some popcorn) Here you go. Now just to wait for Mr. Neil to get his post together... This is gonna be fun.

[crazy-tiger]

[Ouroboros]

Tx, why is it so different that something could survive 65 mil years or 6,000 years?

 

If it would be destroyed because it's 65 mil yr, then it would not be able to be 6,000 years either.

 

So, if the dinos died in the mythical flood, then this piece of meat would have to be intact for 6000 years. And where is the limit? 7,000? 8,000? 11,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? And why would it be a limit if it already crossed normal border of a few days. Wouldn't it go bad in a few days in a normal process, so what would make it survive 6,000 years? Couldn't the same process save it for 65 mil years? If not, why?

[Skankboy]

Not to distract from the discussion (fire away Neil, I look forward to seeing how this goes), but earlier Neil said "There's no way that the dragon myth is based on dinosaurs."

 

My understanding has been that our concept of "dragons" was based on the misinterpretation of dinosaur bones by ancient cultures. If I'm not mistaken, the still call fossils "dragon bones" in parts of the far east and have been grinding them up for medicinal use for quite some time now.

 

A minor point, but I just couldn't keep it to myself.

 

We now return you to your regularly scheduled smackdown of apologetic nonsense...

[Mr. Neil]

Let me start off by saying that the entire premise was doomed from the very beginning, because viper obviously doesn't understand what it is that was actually found. I tried to lead him with some subtle clues about animals preserved in amber, but so lost was he in his black-and-white Christian thinking that he didn't even give it a second thought.

 

Before I tear this miserable non-argument apart, and god damn it I'm gonna do it, I would like to begin with the misconception that has lead to creationists thinking that this is somehow evidence against the great ages of the Earth. Due to the intellectual dubiousness of such fine creationist organizations as Answers in Genesis, the creationists have somehow gotten the misconception that this sample is a wholely perserved, hemoglobin-and-blood-rich sample of dino soft stuff. Nothing could be more wrong.

 

The problem stems from the creationists' misunderstanding of false dichotomies. They can't help it. Their entire worldview is littered with assumptions like, "If A is false, then B is true", while excluding the possibilities of C, D, or E.

 

Thus when the creationist hears that a "preserved soft material" was found, they immediately assume that it was unfossilized. This, however, is wrong. It's stupid wrong!

 

The sample didn't yeild blood or anything like that. So what is it? What was found was fragments of degraded hemoglobin and what they think might be the remnants of blood that had to be demineralized in a weak acid. And by "remnants of blood", that does not mean they found blood. What it means is that the sample contains a residue that may have been left behind by blood.

 

Dr Schweitzer is not making any grand claims that these soft traces are the degraded remnants of the original material - only that they give that appearance.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4379577.stm

 

As you can see, Schweitzer never even came close to suggesting that the sample was anything like a freshly killed animal. In fact, the sample is chemically altered that it barely constitutes as the original matter that made up the tissue. Rather, it appears to have become a polymer resistant to normal fossilization.

 

From the same source as above...

"This may not be fossilisation as we know it, of large macrostructures, but fossilisation at a molecular level," commented Dr Matthew Collins, who studies ancient bio-molecules at York University, UK.

 

"My suspicion is this process has led to the reaction of more resistant molecules with the normal proteins and carbohydrates which make up these cellular structures, and replaced them, so that we have a very tough, resistant, very lipid-rich material - a polymer that would be very difficult to break down and characterise, but which has preserved the structure," he told the BBC.

In short, what has been discovered is a strange phenomenon in which soft tissue is converted into a pliable and resistant polymer that shouldn't be confused for actual fresh hemoglobin or blood. They didn't find anything about this fossil that was even remotely damaging to the scientifically accepted age of the Earth.

 

Now I know what the typical apologist is going to say. "He's only speculating." Perhaps, but it's not as though his speculations are without merit. It isn't as though soft, pliable fossils hadn't been found before.

 

Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, cautions that looks can deceive: Nucleated protozoan cells have been found in 225-million-year-old amber, but geochemical tests revealed that the nuclei had been replaced with resin compounds. Even the resilience of the vessels may be deceptive. Flexible fossils of colonial marine organisms called graptolites have been recovered from 440-million-year-old rocks, but the original material--likely collagen--had not survived.

Source: "Tyrannosaurus rex Soft Tissue Raises Tantalizing Prospects" (Science, vol. 307:1852)

 

WHOOPS!!!!! Suddenly, txviper hasn't a leg to stand on, because there are known examples of soft tissue that can be perserved, and the fossil preservation of the t-rex tissue doesn't yet show to contain anything that would be difficult for the great ages of the Earth! There's absolutely no argument that can be made at all!

 

But this is only the beginning of the end for viper. It gets worse. Much, much worse.

 

Source: Radiometric Dating Does Work! - ncseweb.org

 

The table above shows a number of radiometric dating tests done at the K-T boundary at various different locations. You'll notice on the right that all of these locations have a propensity to give very similar dates, shown in millions of years, which have a real propensity to be within a very distinct range, as very few of them deviate far (or at all) from 64 million years. That's really good, and it's great evidence for the accuracy of radiometric dating that various independant studies are all yeilding very similar dates.

 

You'll also notice that I highlighted one section in particular, Hell's Creek. That's where the T-rex with preserved tissue was found. As you can see, the animal was buried in rock formations that have been dated very precisely to 64+ million years old. That's pretty damning, and it means that fleshy tissue or not, txviper has one hell of a problem on his hands, because now, not only have I taken his argument away from him, but now he's got to account for these radiometric dates that contradict the very timescale that he wants to impose, which is that of six to ten thousand years. His creationist timescale simply doesn't fit the evidence.

 

Now, it's typical for creationists to handwave radiometric dating. I'm sure that txviper planning to pull the usual creationist bullshit of finding instances where dating has been inconsistant, like the living snails that were dated thousands of years old, and crap like that. These are usually dealt with, though, as these inconsistancies are caused by recognizable anomolies, and as discomforting as it may initially appear that radiometric dating can be fooled, it's important to note that there are actually relatively few cases in which this happens. Creationists have to dig to find these examples, and off the top of my head, I could probably think of five, most of which involve carbon-dating, which doesn't even apply to dinosaur fossils.

 

And even if radiometric dating can be fooled, the creationists cannot explain the propensity of evidence, that various locations give extremely similar results, and that different methods of testing yield strikingly similar results as well. What phenomenon could the creationist possibly come up with to account for such a propensity of evidence!? Would they dare to suggest that all of these tests are being fooled by contamination? Would contamination result in such a specific range of erroneous results? Also, contamination of one method would not carry over to the next. For example, a problem with excess argon in 40Ar/39Ar dating would not carry over to another method. If all of these tests are wrong, then what could possibly be making them all register dates of 64+ million years?!

 

The coincidence that txviper would have to appeal to would be absolutely absurd. He would be suggesting that somehow, hundreds of analyses (or even the fifty or so in the table above) are all insanely wrong, despite being so consistant with each other. It boggles the mind that anyone would be brave enough to handwave such damaging evidence against young earth creationism. Essentially, it doesn't matter what was inside the bone in the first place, because the propensity of evidence has placed the fossil's timeline precisely where scientists expected to find it; at the end of the Cretaceous.

 

So to sum things up, viper has no argument, and, in fact, he was asked to provide one on three separate occaisions prior to this post. He couldn't muster so much as a reasonable rebuttal. All he could afford was to squeak out some very mousy objections, and now what little he had has been taken away from him. He went from having the vague appearance of an argument, to having no argument at all, to having a very strong argument against him!

 

Oh, and then he quote-mined a few scientists, which was precious in itself. As long as we're talking about those quotes, though, I'd like to come back to something Han said, because I think it reveals the irrelevence of any kind of point viper could possibly make about the age of the specimen.

 

Tx, why is it so different that something could survive 65 mil years or 6,000 years?

 

If it would be destroyed because it's 65 mil yr, then it would not be able to be 6,000 years either.

 

So, if the dinos died in the mythical flood, then this piece of meat would have to be intact for 6000 years. And where is the limit? 7,000? 8,000? 11,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? And why would it be a limit if it already crossed normal border of a few days. Wouldn't it go bad in a few days in a normal process, so what would make it survive 6,000 years? Couldn't the same process save it for 65 mil years? If not, why?

This is, of course, in reference to viper's Kevin Padian quote, which was, “The conventional wisdom has been that you can’t get residues like this after 10,000 years.” Here's a clue, viper. Conventional wisdom also tells us that you can't get residues like that after 4,000 years. 4,000 years, as you'll recall, is the latest possible (and thus most generous) date that creationists can place the flood. Creationists want us to believe that this animal was buried in flood sediment. Conventional wisdom tells us that this sample should have deteriorated into nothing within 4,000 years.

 

Luckily, conventional wisdom, much like "common sense", is not something that can be reliably appealed to, as it means absolutely nothing. The Padian quote is basically saying that he didn't think that the kind of preservation in the sample was even possible.

 

So now we see that the reason viper couldn't muster an argument was because he didn't have one. He thought he was going to get away with the old link-and-scoff method of creationist falsification. How often as that worked for creationists? Like, never?

 

I anticipate the quibbling that is to come, but I would like the reader to be mindful of watching what arguments he uses. You will find the typical creationist tactics: handwaving, appeals to ignorance, repeating refuted arguments, making mountains out of molehills, etc. He will not be able to find one argument that actually supports his case for a young earth, simply because he doesn't have one.

[crazy-tiger]

Txviper after reading that...

[Mr. Neil]

Not to distract from the discussion (fire away Neil, I look forward to seeing how this goes), but earlier Neil said "There's no way that the dragon myth is based on dinosaurs."

 

My understanding has been that our concept of "dragons" was based on the misinterpretation of dinosaur bones by ancient cultures. If I'm not mistaken, the still call fossils "dragon bones" in parts of the far east and have been grinding them up for medicinal use for quite some time now.

Well, I was referring to living, breathing dinosaurs. The creationists want us to believe that the dinosaurs were there in biblical times, right? But when you look at the way period artists draw animals, you see that they can draw horses, cats, dogs, sheep, cattle, etc., but for some reason, they can't draw the dino-dragons right. If the creationists are right about dinosaurs being dragons, then the dinosaurs should be right there in the field with all of the other animals, but instead of looking like dinosaurs, the ancient artists representations of dragons always come out looking like the classic mammal-like beasts with crocodile heads that you often see in mideval art, or they appear with serpent-like features, like the Chinese dragons.