Posted on 07/30/2007 2:01:00 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Geologists have found the remains of a huge underground rainforest hidden in a coal mine in Illinois. The fossil forest, buried by an earthquake 300 million years ago, contains giant versions of several plant types alive today.
...
Also surprising is the presence of remains from mangrove-like plants. "It was always assumed that mangrove plants had evolved fairly recently," says Falcon-Lang.
(Excerpt) Read more at bioedonline.org ...
==Because evolution was brought about as a means to dispel creationism, not as true means of science.
Very true, as the following quotes illustrate (talk about faith-based!):
“Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.”
Provine, William B. [Professor of Biological Sciences, Cornell University], “, “Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life”, Abstract of Will Provine’s 1998 Darwin Day Keynote Address.
“It is no more heretical to say the Universe displays purpose, as Hoyle has done, than to say that it is pointless, as Steven Weinberg has done. Both statements are metaphysical and outside science. Yet it seems that scientists are permitted by their own colleagues to say metaphysical things about lack of purpose and not the reverse. This suggests to me that science, in allowing this metaphysical notion, sees itself as religion and presumably as an atheistic religion (if you can have such a thing).”
Shallis, Michael [Astrophysicist, Oxford University], “In the eye of a storm”, New Scientist, January 19, 1984, pp.42-43.
“I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.”
Aldous Huxley: Ends and Means, pp. 270 ff.
And lets not forget Richard Dawkins, a scientists who speaks for millions of the Darwinist faithful:
In 2005 online magazine Edge The World Question Centre posed the following question to a number of scientific intellectuals: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it? Dawkins revealingly answered: I believe that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all design anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection.
for hundreds of years the scientific consensus was the the universe existed forever with no beginning. They couldn’t even get past the first 3 words of the Bible. Imagine someone trying to fit that view with the Bible in those days.
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Wait till they announce they've found a square of pure gold in an old coal seam and the square of gold is engraved with an etching of Kournikova! |
Gravity has yet to be established. It is after all a theory.
note: I meant the first 3 words in hebrew
The basic difference is that guided evolutionists see God as coming in and 'fixing evolution's path' to have the effect he wants. Theistic Evolution believes that before the Universe, God set the rules in motion that resulted in the creation he intended. Another way to look at it is that in guided evolution, God had to course correct evolution, versus Theistic evolution, the course was correct.
Think about it this way.. God is supernatural, he lives outside the laws of the natural world, such as space/time laws. For God, the result and the beginning is the same thing. When he created the system of creation, he created it knowing the result and all its history, existing all in the same moment to God. The entire concept of 'time' as we define it, and is often the biggest challenge in the fight of creation versus evolution, is all human invention based on our observations from our small point in the universe. A day to us is different than a day to people on the space station, so why are we so hung up in defining what a 'day' is to God (not to mention, the term 'day' in the Bible is interchangeable with 'age' or 'event'..) We shouldn't face the flaw of creating God in our image by defining Him or His existence with human terms.
Years ago, I remember looking from a university power plant office window with the plant manager as a student was looking over some of the coal we had just delivered. Some of the stoker coal had flakes of pyrite and we laughed as the kid gathered these up and put them in his pockets...
The Law of Gravity? Ever heard of it?
The great thing about theory is that if a set of conditions goes against the theory then the theory is wrong and a new theory can be formulated and tested. This is how science works.
Probably the last time the earth changed it's axial tilt.
Tongue in cheek
I'm pleasantly surprised, and suddenly feel less alone.
So .... angiosperm tree samples are in this forest?
Just out of curiosity, have you read Dr. Humphreys book entitled “Starlight and Time.” I recently read it, and all the rebuttals, and all his rebuttals to the rebuttals, and have concluded that his book can stand on its own two feet. In short, he uses Einstein’s Gen. Rel. re: gravitational time dilation to demonstrate that the same “Big Bang” event could produce an earth that can at least in theory be thousands of years old relative to a universe that is billions of years old. All you have to do is reverse current Big Bang assumptions. Instead of plugging in a universe with no edge and no center (the current Big Bang assumptions), you simply plug in a universe with an edge and a cente...and a young center and old edge of the universe (relatively speaking) literally “fall out” of Einstein’s GR equations. It’s a very short book and easy to read. Check it out, if you haven’t done so already.
Being that I grew up in Vermilion County, I had to see if I could find more info about which mines they were talking about. My search led to me to the following link, where there is more information and pictures of a lot of the fossils they have found:
http://www.isgs.uiuc.edu/research/coal/fossil-forest/fossil-forest.shtml
“But Falcon-Lang is philosophical about losing the forest, pointing out that if it weren’t for mining, the forest would never have been discovered in the first place.”
Cant believe he admitted it.... well there goes his research grant for not following “the code”
Will that make it smell better?
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