In spite of this remarkable similarity, Gish continues to claim that the Java Man is an ape, while the Turkana Boy is a modern human. In his words, they are "very apelike" and "remarkably human" respectively. If a "human" and an "ape" that look almost identical aren't transitional fossils, what would be?
Creationists have the same problem with Archaeopteryx. Some hand-wave it away as "it's clearly just a bird", the rest with "it's clearly just a reptile". Obviously it's not really "clearly" one or the other after all.
They have the same problem with hominid fossils, as you note. What follows is excerpted from this webpage. (I have highlighted a key passage in a red font, it was bolded in the original but not in red.)
The following table summarizes the diversity of creationist opinions about some of the more prominent items in the human fossil record. (If your browser doesn't support tables, click here for a text version.)
Creationist Classifications of Hominid Fossils Specimen Cuozzo
(1998)Gish
(1985)Mehlert
(1996)Bowden
(1981)
Menton
(1988)
Taylor
(1992)
Gish
(1979)Baker
(1976)
Taylor
and Van
Bebber
(1995)Taylor
(1996)
Lubenow
(1992)ER 1813
(510 cc)Ape Ape Ape Ape Ape Ape Java
(940 cc)Ape Ape Human Ape Ape Human Peking
(915-
1225 cc)Ape Ape Human Ape Human Human ER 1470
(750 cc)Ape Ape Ape Human Human Human ER 3733
(850 cc)Ape Human Human Human Human Human WT 15000
(880 cc)Ape Human Human Human Human Human As this table shows, although creationists are adamant that none of these are transitional and all are either apes or humans, they are not able to tell which are which. In fact, there are a number of creationists who have changed their opinion on some fossils. They do not even appear to be converging towards a consistent opinion. Gish and Taylor both used to consider Peking Man an ape and 1470 a human, but now Gish says they are both apes, and Taylor says they were both humans. Interestingly, widely differing views are held by two of the most prominent creationist researchers on human origins, Gish and Lubenow. Bowden, who has also written a book on human evolution, agrees with neither of them, and Mehlert, who has written a number of articles on human evolution in creationist journals, has yet another opinion, as does Cuozzo in his 1998 book on Neandertals. Cuozzo has taken the most extreme stance yet for a young-earth creationist, saying that even H. erectus fossils (in which he includes the Turkana Boy) should not be considered human. (Old-earth creationist Hugh Ross takes an even more extreme stance, claiming that not even Neandertals should be classified as human.)
It could be pointed out that evolutionists also disagree on how fossils should be classified, which species they belong to, etc. True enough. But according to evolutionary thinking, these fossils come from a number of closely related species intermediate between apes and humans. If this is so, we would expect to find that some of them are hard to classify, and we do.
Creationists, on the other hand, assert that apes and humans are separated by a wide gap. If this is true, deciding on which side of that gap individual fossils lie should be trivially easy. Clearly, that is not the case.
ER 1813 (H. habilis?, 510 cc) is almost totally ignored by creationists, but it is safe to say that they would all classify it as an ape. Few mention ER 3733 (H. erectus, 850 cc) either, but those who do seem to consider it human (although it's hard to be sure in Bowden's case). As one would expect given its essentially human skeleton, virtually all creationists consider the Turkana Boy to be human, although Cuozzo has been a recent exception. (Cuozzo recognizes that it is different from any modern ape, of course; he believes that apes have degenerated from Homo erectus, just as he believes that modern humans have degenerated from Neandertals.)
It would be fascinating to know what creationists think about fossils such as OH 12 (H. erectus, 750 cc), Sangiran 2 (H. erectus, 815 cc), OH 7 (H. habilis, 680 cc), OH 13 (H. habilis, 650 cc), but unfortunately few creationists even mention these fossils, let alone discuss them in any depth.
