Evolution and Religion

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This relates to concepts about the “age of dinosaurs,” but let’s put aside that concept for the moment. Have you ever encountered a statement similar to the following?

“Evolution is a proven scientific fact.”

True scientific progress requires working with details, and “evolution” (meaning Darwinian theory) has been compared to a room full of smoke, according to David Berlinski, in the documentary Expelled-No Intelligence Allowed:

One of my prevailing doctrines about Darwinian Theory is: man that thing is just a mess. It’s like looking into a room full of smoke. Nothing in the theory is precisely, clearly, carefully defined and delineated. It lacks all of the rigor one expects from Mathematical Physics. And Mathematical Physics lacks all of the rigor one expects from Mathematics. So we’re talking about a gradual decent down the level of intelligibility, until we reach Evolutionary Biology.

Unlimited Common Ancestry

We can blow away some of that smoke by being specific. Many persons assume there is only one concept of biological evolution and they just call it “evolution.” But the General Theory of Evolution mainly involves the philosophy of unlimited common ancestry, so let’s look deeper. Yes indeed it is philosophy and not science, although many persons have assumed it is pure science.

What is unlimited common ancestry? (I like to use that phrase for it is specific.) It’s when a person assumes that when two different biological organisms may have had a common ancestor then they did have one. That is not scientific, it is philosophical.

Darwin used that approach in his books On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, and countless of his followers have continued to use that philosophy. One of the big problems is that this philosophy has been forced into our consciousness (or subconsciousness) in the name of “science.”

When I say unlimited common ancestry (we’ll use UCA), I don’t mean insistence that all living organisms must have had one common ancestor; it’s not quite that. The concept that all plant life had one common and all animal life had another common ancestor—that could fit well into the philosophy of UCA, if the evidence was convincing enough that the two basic forms of life had different original ancestors. The point of this philosophy, in that case, would be insisting we then assume that there were not more than two original ancestors. Notice the insistence.

What do we learn from Genesis? Biological details are scarce indeed, but it seems that this planet originally had many original ancestors of modern organisms, perhaps thousands of original life forms. That’s a far cry from both the insistence of UCA and the countless species that now exist in our wonderful world. Hardly anybody denies all forms of evolution, for humans themselves have caused a wide variety living things to come forth, for example: domesticated animals, including many varieties of cattle, horses, dogs, and cats. But those many kinds came about by human intelligence and from a variety or original ancestors. We did not start with mud puddles but with wonderful early forms of animals. Environment may play a part in shaping some characteristics in animal life, over long periods of time, but the shaping was done in selecting from among many of the wonderful genes that had already existed “after their kind.”

Dating Problems With Dinosaurs

I refer to carbon-14 radiometric dating problems, not dinosaur extinction from those animals hanging out in groups and avoiding serious courtship dating.

The two problems with C14 testing of dinosaur bones comes from two perspectives:

  1. The dates are shocking
  2. The dating has been discontinued, because of shock

Soon after the 2012 geology conference in Singapore, carbon-dating laboratories, at least in the United States, stopped testing any materials that might be dinosaur remains.

Why? It could make them look silly, for the dates always turn out to be in the range of tens of thousands of years, with radioactive carbon always present. How shocking!

Directly testing the ages of dinosaurs bones always shows them to be only a tiny fraction of the ages that we have been indoctrinated into believing. Dinosaurs really did live alongside humans, and that knowledge comes from carbon-14 dating.

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Carbon Radiometric Dating of Dinosaur Bones

Scientific methods and instrumentation have greatly improved since the earlier days of dinosaur dating, and those old assumptions are now being tested.

Carbon dated dinosaur fossils

Members of the Paleochronology group presented their findings at the 2012 Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting in Singapore, August 13-17, a conference of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society (AOGS).

The Gospel and the Scientific View

The worldwide flood of Noah’s time has been accepted as a benchmark historical event by Jews and Christians for thousands of years—and similar traditions appear among the Greeks, Mesopotamians, and some American Indian tribes.

Evolutionary Boundary

Darwin’s Natural Selection actually PREVENTS ANY major biological-development change in ANY organism.

LDS Nonfiction Book

Three nonfiction books by the L.D.S. author Jonathan Whitcomb—each can take you into an astonishing world of cryptozoology, into a narrow field of the paranormal-like investigations of eyewitness accounts of apparent living pterosaurs.

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