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To: Nathan Zachary
I think evolutionists are just afraid of discovering God, because then they will have to answer to him.

I think creationists are just afraid of having their faith challenged, because then they will have to cope with a more complex picture of reality.

Many evolutionists have already said it's time to move on, that the evolution theory is flawed.

Really? Who?

We have discovered the machine, machines are designed with inteligence.

Machines do not engage in imperfect replication. Your argument is really a repetition of Paley's watchmaker.

32 posted on 10/03/2005 8:06:52 AM PDT by malakhi
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To: malakhi
" Really? Who?"

Darwin for one:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree possible. (Darwin, Origin of Species, 155.)

"Firstly, why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined? (Darwin, Origin of Species, 143.)

"Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory." (Ibid., 230)

"Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed." (Ibid., 149)

The late Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University:

"The history of most fossil species includes two features inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Statis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear… 2. Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed'. 6 The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils." (Gould, "Evolution's Erratic Pace," Natural History, Vol. 5, 1977)

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum and editor of a prestigious scientific journal:

"..I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be used to visualize such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic license, would that not mislead the reader? I wrote the text of my book four years ago. If I were to write it now, I think the book would be rather different. Gradualism is a concept I believe in, not just because of Darwin's authority, but because my understanding of genetics seems to demand it. Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a paleontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least "show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived." I will lay it on the line - there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument." (Colin Patterson, personal communication. Luther Sunderland, Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems, 4th edition, 1988, 88-90.)

David B. Kitts. PhD (Zoology) is Head Curator of the Department of Geology at the Stoval Museum. In an evolutionary trade journal, he wrote:

"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of "seeing" evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of "gaps" in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them" (Evolution, vol. 28, 467.)

N. Heribert Nilsson, a famous botanist, evolutionist and professor at Lund University in Sweden:

"My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed… The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled." (Nilsson quoted in The Earth Before Man, p. 51.)

In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions… these have not been found -- yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks. (David M. Raup, "Evolution and the Fossil Record," Science, vol. 213, July 1981, 289)

Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums are filled with over 100 million fossils of 250,000 different species. The availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What is the picture which the fossils have given us?… The gaps between major groups of organisms have been growing even wider and more undeniable. They can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection of the fossil record. (Luther D. Sutherland, Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems, 4th edition, Master Books, 1988, 9.)

And there are many many more.

51 posted on 10/03/2005 8:30:57 AM PDT by Nathan Zachary
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